The New York Review Of Books, may 12, 2016

Alma Guillermoprieto: In Cuba—The Big Change May 12, 2016 / Volume LXIII, Number 8

THE ART ISSUE! ANKA MUHLSTEIN:

DEGAS

AT MOMA

INGRID ROWLAND:

‘UNFINISHED’

AT THE MET BREUER

JED PERL:

MATISSE

AT THE BARNES

JAMES FENTON:

VAN DYCK

AT THE FRICK

SANFORD SCHWARTZ:

SURPRISE

AT THE GUGGENHEIM

JOHN RICHARDSON:

‘GUERNICA’ REVEALED

Andrew Nathan: Who Is Xi? Peter Singer: Open the Cages!

NEW FROM

THE GETTY Robert Mapplethorpe The Photographs Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen One of the most influential and controversial figures in twentieth-century photography, Robert Mapplethorpe still stands as an example to emerging photographers who experiment with the boundaries and concepts of the beautiful. In this timely reexamination of his oeuvre, the authors have put together a rich selection of images with bracing essays to provide a fuller and more nuanced view of this important artist.

THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM Hardcover $59.95

Robert Mapplethorpe The Archive Frances Terpak and Michelle Brunnick Throughout his life, Robert Mapplethorpe kept rich studio files and art from every period and vein of his career: not just photographs, but his student work, sculpture, jewelry, and commercial assignments. The resulting archive of these works is fascinating and astonishing. This elegantly conceived volume lifts a veil on this little-known resource and sheds new light on the artist’s motivations, connections, and talent as a curator and collector.

THE GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE Hardcover $49.95

The Thrill of the Chase The Wagstaff Collection of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum Paul Martineau From 1973 to 1984, Samuel J. Wagstaff amassed a remarkable 26,000 photographs, ranging from well-known masterpieces to images from obscure sources, such as daguerreotypes and cartes-de-visite. This gorgeous exhibition catalogue offers an amazing overview of Wagstaff’s idiosyncratic collection, vividly reproducing over 150 of his finest photographs.

THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM Hardcover $59.95

Noir The Romance of Black in 19th-Century French Drawings and Prints Edited by Lee Hendrix The nineteenth century saw a technological boom in drawing media, such as black chalk and charcoal, allowing artists to experiment in unprecedented ways. The resulting art is evocative, stunning, and even eerie. With dazzling reproductions and lucid prose, Noir explores these inventive works on paper and brings together artists as diverse as Goya, Redon, and Courbet.

THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM Hardcover $39.95

Made in Los Angeles Materials, Processes, and the Birth of West Coast Minimalism Rachel Rivenc In the 1960s, a dynamic artistic movement exploded in Los Angeles, one rooted in simple shapes, pristine reflective surfaces, and brilliant color. With the unique eye of a conservator, Rachel Rivenc takes on four icons of West Coast Minimalism—Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, and John McCracken— and offers an understanding of these artists within the context of the burgeoning midcentury art scene and the light-infused LA cityscape.

THE GETTY CONSERVATION INSTITUTE Paper $49.00

Man Ray Writings on Art Edited by Jennifer Mundy By turns whimsical and determined, astute and experimental, Man Ray was an artist who truly came alive in his writing. Functioning as both an intriguing introduction to his work and as an essential addition to the completist’s library, this lively volume gathers Man Ray’s most significant writings—many of which have never before been published—to provide a fuller and richer portrait of this twentieth-century master.

THE GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE Hardcover $50.00

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Contents 4 8

John Richardson Andrew J. Nathan

12 14

Frederick Seidel Anka Muhlstein

18 22

Alma Guillermoprieto Peter Singer

27

Ingrid D. Rowland

30 32 34 36

Jed S. Rakoff Jeremy Bernstein Jennifer Homans Nathaniel Rich

43

Sanford Schwartz

46

Joshua Hammer

50 53

Francine Prose Jed Perl

56 58

Natalie Angier Charles Simic

60

Michael Ignatieff

61 62 66

Rainer Maria Rilke Larry Rohter James Fenton

68

Patricia Storace

70 71 73

Willibald Sauerländer Keith Thomas Letters from

Gernika, 1937: The Market Day Massacre by Xabier Irujo Xi Jinping: Red China, the Next Generation by Agnès Andrésy and three other books and articles about Xi and China Poem Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City Catalog of the exhibition edited by Jodi Hauptman Cuba: The Big Change The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers Are Transforming the Lives of Animals

by Wayne Pacelle Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible an exhibition at The Met Breuer, New York City Catalog of the exhibition by Kelly Baum, Andrea Bayer, and Sheena Wagstaff Nasreen Mohamedi: Waiting Is a Part of Intense Living an exhibition at The Met Breuer, New York City Catalog of the exhibition by Roobina Karode, Geeta Kapur, Deepak Ananth, and Andrea Giunta Relation: A Performance Residency by Vijay Iyer at The Met Breuer, New York City Neuroscience and the Law: Don’t Rush In The Trump Bomb Agon a ballet by Igor Stravinsky, with choreography by George Balanchine All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin by Douglas Field Early Novels and Stories by James Baldwin, edited by Toni Morrison Collected Essays by James Baldwin, edited by Toni Morrison Later Novels by James Baldwin, edited by Darryl Pinckney The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin, edited by Randall Kenan Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City Catalog of the exhibition edited by Nancy Spector and Nat Trotman Kathmandu by Thomas Bell Battles of the New Republic: A Contemporary History of Nepal by Prashant Jha Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems by Robin Coste Lewis Matisse in the Barnes Foundation edited by Yve-Alain Bois Graphic Passion: Matisse and the Book Arts an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City Catalog of the exhibition by John Bidwell and others Ellsworth Kelly: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Reliefs, and Sculpture, Volume 1 by Yve-Alain Bois Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning) by Marion Nestle Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult by Bohumil Hrabal, translated by Paul Wilson Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal, translated by Michael Henry Heim The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932–1943 edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky and translated by Tatiana Sorokina and Oliver Ready Poem Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio by Misha Glenny Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture an exhibition at the Frick Collection, New York City Catalog of the exhibition by Stijn Alsteens and Adam Eaker The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold by Jeanette Winterson The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare, directed by Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh The Triumph of Piero della Francesca The English and Their History by Robert Tombs Ronald F. Marshall, Garry Wills, Robert Winter, and Seyla Benhabib

THE PARADOX OF REFORM

PRISONERS OF HOPE LYNDON B. JOHNSON, THE GREAT SOCIETY, AND THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM

RANDALL B. WOODS

CONTRIBUTORS NATALIE ANGIER writes about science for The New York Times. She is the author of Natural Obsessions: The Search for the Oncogene and Woman: An Intimate Geography, among other books.

JEREMY BERNSTEIN’s new book, A Bouquet of Numbers and Other Scientific Offerings, will be published in August.

JAMES FENTON is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 until 1999, he was Oxford Professor of Poetry; in 2015 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize.

He is the author of School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts and, most recently, Yellow Tulips: Poems, 1968–2011.

ALMA GUILLERMOPRIETO is a frequent contributor to The New York Review, often writing on Latin America. She is the author of Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution, among other books.

JOSHUA HAMMER is a former Newsweek Bureau Chief and Correspondentat-Large in Africa and the Middle East. His new book, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts, was published in April.

JENNIFER HOMANS is the author of Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. She is the Founder and Director of the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, where she is also a Distinguished Scholar. She is currently working on a biography of George Balanchine.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF is the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics.

ANKA MUHLSTEIN was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1996 for her biography of Astolphe de Custine, and has twice received the History Prize of the French Academy. Her new book, The Pen and the Brush: How Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century French Novels, will be published in France this fall; an English translation will be available in the US in January 2017. ANTONY SHUGAAR is a contributing editor at Asymptote journal and translated six of the eight episodes of the upcoming HBO miniseries The Young Pope.

ANDREW J. NATHAN is Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia. He is the author of China’s Transition, China’s Crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Prospects for Democracy, and Chinese Democracy, the coauthor of China’s Search for Security, and the coeditor of The Tiananmen Papers.

JED PERL’s books include Magicians and Charlatans, Antoine’s Alphabet, and New Art City. He is currently working on the first full-length biography of Alexander Calder.

FRANCINE PROSE is a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard. Her new novel, Mister Monkey, will be published in October.

JED S. RAKOFF is a United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York.

NATHANIEL RICH is the author, most recently, of Odds Against Tomorrow.

JOHN RICHARDSON’s four-volume Life of Picasso is due to be finished this year.

RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875–1926) was a poet and novelist. PAUL EPRILE is a poet and translator. His translation of Jean Giono’s novel Hill has just been published. ALFRED CORN is the author, most recently, of Miranda’s Book, a novel, and Unions, a collection of poems.

LARRY ROHTER was Rio de Janeiro Bureau Chief for The New York Times from 1999 through 2007 and is now a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis D. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is the author of Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed.

INGRID D. ROWLAND is a Professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gateway. Her most recent book is From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town.

WILLIBALD SAUERLÄNDER is a former Director of the Central Institute for Art History in Munich. His latest book is Manet Paints Monet: A Summer in Argenteuil. DAVID DOLLENMAYER’s most recent translation is of Martin Walser’s A Gushing Fountain.

SANFORD SCHWARTZ is the author of Christen Købke and William Nicholson.

FREDERICK SEIDEL’s most recent book of poems, Widening Income Inequality, was published in February.

CHARLES SIMIC has been Poet Laureate of the United States. His most recent books, The Lunatic, a volume of poetry, and The Life of Images, a book of his selected prose, were published last year.

PETER SINGER is the Ira W. Decamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His books include Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Most Good You Can Do, and, most recently, Famine, Affluence, and Morality.

PATRICIA STORACE is the author of Heredity, a volume of poems, Dinner with Persephone, a travel memoir about Greece, and Sugar Cane, a children’s book. Her most recent book is the novel A Book of Heaven.

KEITH THOMAS is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England.

Online comment from New York Review contributors at nybooks.com/daily » Simon Head: Clinton’s Goldman Problem » Jenny Uglow: Drawing Rome » George Soros: Europe’s Refugee Solution » Tim Judah: Filming the Balkans Plus: Elizabeth Drew on the campaigns, Germany’s new right, and more Editor: Robert B. Silvers Senior Editors: Michael Shae, Hugh Eakin, Eve Bowen, Jana Prikryl Contributing Editor: Ann Kjellberg Assistant Editors: Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Christopher Carroll, Madeleine Schwartz

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On the cover: details from Edgar Degas, Ludovic Halévy Finds Mme. Cardinal in the Dressing Room, circa 1876–1877 (Private Collection), and Beside the Sea, 1876–1877 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), both of which appear in full on pages 73 and 74. The illustration on page 8 is by James Ferguson. The engraving on page 24 is by Grandville. The drawing on page 32 is by John Springs. The painting by Pablo Picasso on page 4 is © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The photograph by Dora Maar on page 6 is © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. The photograph by Eudora Welty on page 50 is reprinted by permission of the Mississippi Department of Archives History and Russell & Volkening as agents for the author; copyright © 2016 by Eudora Welty, renewed by Eudora Welty, LLC . The print by Henri Matisse on page 53 is © 2015 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The painting by Ellsworth Kelly on page 55 is © Ellsworth Kelly/Collection Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, Fractional and Promised Gift to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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“Learned and deeply researched, Randall B. Woods has written the history of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society that we have long needed. This is a must-read book.”

—THOMAS J. SUGRUE, author of Sweet Land of Liberty “The most penetrating, lively, and readable history of the birth pains of the Great Society’s social and economic revolution. Randall B. Woods weaves a fascinating tale of how, in pursuit of social justice, LBJ pushed, shoved, and shoehorned the government into American life.”

—JOSEPH A. CALIFANO, JR. “A sympathetic but also gimlet-eyed scholar’s look at a towering physical and political presence who learned, to his sorrow, that good intentions were insufficient.”

—KIRKUS REVIEWS

3

A Different Guernica John Richardson

In Gernika, 1937: The Market Day Massacre, the historian Xabier Irujo reveals the hitherto unknown fact that the destruction of the historic Basque town of Guernica was planned by Nazi minister Hermann Göring as a gift for Hitler’s birthday, April 20. Guernica, the parliamentary seat of Biscay province, had not as yet been dragged into the Spanish civil war and was without defenses. Logistical problems delayed Göring’s master plan. As a result, Hitler’s birthday treat had to be postponed until April 26.

Besides celebrating the Führer’s birthday, the attack on Guernica served as a tactical military and aeronautical experiment to test the Luftwaffe’s ability to annihilate an entire city and crush the morale of its people.

The Condor Legion’s chief of staff, Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, painstakingly devised the operation to maximize human casualties, and above all deaths. A brief initial bombing at 4:30 PM drove much of the population into air-raid shelters. When Guernica’s citizens emerged from these shelters to rescue the wounded, a second, longer wave of bombing began, trapping them in the town center from which there was no escape. Low-flying planes strafed the streets with machine-gun fire. Those who had managed to survive were incinerated by the flames or asphyxiated by the lack of oxygen.

Three hours of coordinated air strikes leveled the city and killed over 1,500 civilians. In his war diary, Richthofen described the operation as “absolutely fabulous! . . . a complete technical success.” The Führer was so thrilled that, two years later, he ordered Richthofen to employ the same bombing techniques, on an infinitely greater scale, to lay waste to Warsaw, thereby setting off World War II. The morning after the bombing, Radio Bilbao broadcast a statement by the Basque president José Antonio Aguirre breaking the news to the world that Guernica had been annihilated by the Luftwaffe. The Basque and Spanish communities in Paris went into immediate action. When the poet Juan Larrea, the director of information at the Spanish embassy, heard the news from the Basque artist José Maria Ucelay outside the Champs-Elysées metro station, he jumped into a cab and drove to the Café de Flore where Picasso hung out.1 Four months earlier, the artist had been commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish Republican pavilion at the upcoming Paris World’s Fair (L’Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne).

As the most ardent promoter of Spain’s pavilion, Larrea, who had been instrumental in having Picasso appointed director of the Prado, realized that the obliteration of Guernica would provide 1

Gijs van Hensbergen, Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth- Century Icon (Bloomsbury, 2004), pp. 32–33.

4

the artist with the very subject he had been seeking. When Picasso claimed to have no idea what a bombed town looked like, Larrea replied, “like a bull in a china shop, run amok.”

Picasso had not as yet chosen a sub-

ject for his World’s Fair commission.

As often before, he had envisioned his studio—a favorite setting and the vortex of the world—in a series of sketchy designs. Within a week of the attack on Guernica, he abandoned this theme and began working along the lines suggested by Larrea. By May 9, he had

have not yet gotten around to seeing the image of his long- dead sister Conchita in the picture and the significance of Picasso’s broken vow he had made when she was ill.

In an article published in these pages, I described how Picasso, at the age of fourteen, had vowed to God that he would never paint again if Conchita, stricken with diptheria, survived.2 He did paint again and she died. Henceforth, many of the women in Picasso’s life would be sacrificed for his art.

Conchita makes an appearance in the first sketches for Guernica and would remain through all the subse-

to eschew color and give the work the black-and-white immediacy of a photograph. He did not want a shiny surface, so he asked the manufacturers of Ripolin paint whether they could develop an ultra-matte house paint. They succeeded and Guernica would be the first time it was used.

Besides making a photographic record of Guernica’s development, Dora took over when publicity people insisted on an official press photograph of the canvas. Parts were unfinished.

Picasso was busy, so he had Dora do the final touches—the short vertical brushstrokes that differentiate the horse’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Gernika, 1937: The Market Day Massacre

by Xabier Irujo.

University of Nevada Press, 311 pp., $44.95

Pablo Picasso: Guernica, oil on canvas, May 1–June 4, 1937

come up with a preliminary composition in a pencil drawing. It included most of the elements he had been playing around with but they did not as yet cohere into a viable concept. By May 11, the drawing would reemerge in full scale on the enormous canvas that would be the dominant feature of the Spanish pavilion.

Picasso’s Surrealist friends André Breton and Paul Éluard had been pressuring him for years to join the Communist Party, though both had been expelled from the Party four years before. The raised arm with a clenched fist seen in the first sketch of Guernica suggests that they were making headway. The Communist salute was also used in Spain during the civil war as a gesture of antifascist solidarity, but Picasso ultimately decided not to use it. He did not want his work to have an overly political, let alone Soviet tinge, and the fist soon disappeared from the composition. Insofar as he had any political views, Picasso was a passionate pacifist.

The artist would not become a Communist until October 1944 at the end of World War II. So impressed was he by de Gaulle’s triumphant return to Paris that he agreed to join the Gaullists, but after a dinner with some of them, he told his mistress Dora Maar, “c’est une bande de cons,” and immediately joined the Communist Party.

Picasso dealt with the subject of Guernica by personalizing it. Like most of his greatest works, it is pervaded with his own problems and preoccupations. Without understanding the artist’s votive obsession, scholars

quent variations. Hitherto, nobody has identified her, let alone explained her votive presence. Conchita no longer figures as a child, as she does in Minotauromachie, but has been transformed into an adult who thrusts out the sacred lamp clutched in her hand in order to have it lit by the Mithraic sun. This gesture was echoed in one of the five sculptures that appeared with Guernica at the Spanish pavilion: Picasso’s over-life-size 1933 Woman with a Lamp, which he had recast for the World’s Fair. So meaningful was this sculpture to Picasso that he would later arrange for a bronze cast to preside over his grave at his country residence, the Château de Vauvenargues.

Years

later, in 1992, I interviewed my old friend Dora Maar, a talented photographer, who had witnessed and documented the making of Guernica.

Picasso had told her: “I know I am going to have terrible problems with this painting, but I am determined to do it—we have to arm for the war to come.” Dora confirmed that the seemingly ironical addition of a light bulb inside the Mithraic sun in Guernica was a reference to her electrical equipment that littered Picasso’s studio on the rue des Grands Augustins in Paris.

Dora’s expertise would prove immensely useful; she was able to make the first photographic record of the creation of a modern artwork from start to finish. It also helped Picasso 2

“Picasso’s Broken Vow,” The New York Review, June 25, 2015.

body and legs. The artist had told her that the dying horse in Guernica stands for pain and death—“la douleur et la mort”—and is also an allusion to the horses of the Apocalypse. The horseshoe next to the head of the dismembered soldier (bottom left) refers to the sacred crescent of Islam and Picasso’s fear of Franco’s Moroccan troops. He inveighed against the prospect of yet another Moorish occupation of Spain.

Although Dora claimed that the bull represents the people of Spain, the fact that it is based on magnificent drawings of Picasso in the role of a bearded minotaur suggests that it had a more personal significance. In the painting he portrays himself as a minotaur who coolly turns away from the carnage, seemingly unfazed by the mother figure holding a dead baby in her arms as she screams up at him. Dora referred to the table where there is a bird as a sacrificial altar. The bull and the bird are sacrificial victims.

Dora also told me that she had herself inspired the woman on fire (top right) as well as the long-legged woman in the foreground. In his memoir, the British sculptor Henry Moore describes how a group consisting of Paul Éluard, André Breton, Roland Penrose, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, and himself had lunched together and called on Picasso to see what new work he had been doing: Guernica was still a long way from being finished. It was like a cartoon just laid in black and grey, and he could have coloured it as he coloured the sketches. Anyway, The New York Review

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5

you know the woman who comes running out of the little cabin on the right with one hand held in front of her? Well, Picasso told us that there was something missing there, and he went and fetched a roll of [toilet] paper and stuck it in the woman’s hand, as much to say that she’d been caught in the bathroom when the bombs came.

tian Zervos celebrated the painting in an impeccably illustrated double issue of his avant-garde magazine Cahiers d’Art. It reproduced many of the preliminary sketches and Dora’s photographs with commentaries by Michel Leiris and the Spanish poet and playwright José Bergamín, as well as a poem by Paul Éluard, “La victoire de Guernica.”

When Guernica went on display at the Exposition Internationale, the organizers at the Spanish pavilion questioned its merits. Some disapproved of its modernist style and clamored for its removal. As a result, Max Aub, cultural attaché to the Spanish embassy in Paris and a fervent backer of Picasso, felt compelled to defend Guernica:

erything about it makes me uncomfortable—the grandiloquent technique as well as the way it politicizes art. Both Alberti and Bergamin share my aversion. Indeed all three of us would be delighted to blow up the painting.

Even more galling was the Basque government’s reaction. Picasso had generously offered Guernica to the Basque people but, to his fury, their president disdainfully refused. Picasso felt the Basques should be grateful to him for memorializing their ancient capital. Instead, the Basque artist Ucelay, who loathed the painting, believed the commission should have gone to a fellow Basque, and denounced Guernica: Private Collection/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images

The artist then announced to his guests: “There, that leaves no doubt about the commonest and most primitive effect of fear.” Moore commented, “That was just like him, of course—to be tremendously moved about Spain and yet turn it aside with a joke.”

Dora photographed every major change in Guernica’s astonishingly rapid development.

Her photographs of the sucAs a work of art it’s one of the cessive states of the painting poorest things ever produced are not dated, but their order in the world. It has no sense of is self- evident. Picasso comcomposition, or for that matpleted the great canvas on June ter anything. . . . It’s just seven 4. It had taken him thirty-five by three meters of pornogradays. Dora was also in charge phy, shitting on Gernika, on of the flow of visitors whom the Euskadi [Basque country], artist was obliged to receive. on everything.

Although Picasso had always discouraged strangers from As was to be expected, the watching him at work, he felt Nazis reacted to Guernica that the painting needed to be with contempt. The Gerpublicized for the sake of the man guide to the World’s Fair antifascist cause. He was ready called the painting a “hodgeto welcome into his studio felpodge of body parts that low artists and influential politiany four-year- old could have cians, as well as other members painted.” Ironically, the openof the European avant-garde. ing of the Spanish pavilion in Guernica established Picasso Paris roughly coincided with as the world’s most celebrated the opening of the “Entartete modern artist, as beloved by Kunst” (Degenerate Art) exhithe young as he was loathed by bition in Munich. fascists, right-wing bigots, and On November 1, Paris’s Exacademic hacks. position Internationale closed In later years Dora dismissed and Guernica was returned to Pablo Picasso painting Guernica in his studio, Paris, 1937; most of what had been written Picasso. Eight days later, he atphotograph by Dora Maar about Guernica. After breaktended the annual ceremony at ing with Picasso, she would bethe Père-Lachaise cemetery in This art may be accused of being come a fervent born-again Catholic. She honor of Guillaume Apollinaire (who too abstract or difficult for a padisliked discussing her feelings, except died in 1918), who had been the closest vilion like ours that wishes to be when it came to her all-important role as and most influential of his poet friends. above all and before everything photographer. It was Dora’s masochistic Up till then, Picasso’s magnificent else a popular expression. But I am nature that Picasso had evoked in his model for a monument in honor of the certain that with a little will, everymost harrowing studies for Guernica, poet had failed to find favor with Apolone will perceive the rage, the desand above all in the Weeping Woman linaire’s widow and others who wanted peration, and the terrible protest series begun on May 24, before the great a traditional memorial. Admirers from that this canvas signifies. painting was finished. all over Europe attended the ceremony.

As he later stated, Picasso could Larrea, the Spanish director of inforOther Spanish officials did indeed never have portrayed Dora laughing: mation, recorded a dramatic confronfeel that Guernica was too avant-garde “For me she’s the weeping woman. For tation between Picasso and Filippo for visitors to appreciate, and tried to years I’ve painted her in tortured forms, Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of replace it with another work commisnot through sadism, and not with pleaFuturism and “Fascist Italy’s bigwig sioned for the pavilion: Horacio Fersure, either; just obeying a vision that intellectual, rather a curiosity to those rer de Morgado’s corny Madrid 1937 forced itself on me. It was a deep reality, hanging around him.”

(Black Aeroplanes). This composition not a superficial one.” Smeared lipstick, Not far away, in another group exploited some of the same motifs used smudged eye makeup, tears seemingly of more modest appearance, stood

by Picasso—air-raid victims and gutwired to the eyes, and the soaked handPicasso. All of a sudden, full of himself ted buildings—but Morgado’s kitschy kerchief clutched in her spiky fingerand arrogant, the bearer of Fascist inrepresentationalism was more to the nailed hands capture her extreme states famy approached the Spanish painter, taste of the public than Picasso’s bleak of agony, mental as well as physical. The his hands outstretched and saying monochrome modernism. The raised Weeping Woman images emerged from for everyone to hear: “I assume that fists and red-scarved figures depicted Guernica. They too gave a personal in front of Apollinaire’s tomb you

by Morgado also had far more appeal form to the horrors of the Spanish civil won’t see any inconvenience in shakto Spanish Communists. Prominently war. In December 1937, Picasso deing my hand.” To which Picasso redisplayed, Black Aeroplanes was declared: “Artists who live and work with plied, “You seem to forget that we’re scribed to Republican leaders as “the spiritual values cannot and should not at war.” greatest popular success” of the pavilremain indifferent to a conflict in which After Guernica was returned to ion. Whereas Guernica, according to the highest values of humanity and civihim, Picasso arranged for it to tour Le Corbusier, “saw only the backs of lization are at stake.”

Scandinavia and England. It arrived visitors, for they were repelled by it.” in London on September 30, 1938, and Some Spanish modernists took was exhibited at the New Burlington espite Picasso’s fame, the French against Guernica. The movie director Galleries where I, a fourteen-year- old press virtually ignored Guernica. Even Luis Buñuel later confessed: schoolboy, was overwhelmed by it. A the Communist newspaper L’Humanité’s meeting with Picasso thirteen years star contributor Louis Aragon failed to I can’t stand Guernica, which I later developed into friendship, which mention it. Only the art publisher Chrisnevertheless helped to hang. Evwould inspire a biography.

D

6

The New York Review

richard learoyd, Tatiana, 2011

Robert Adams Diane Arbus Bernd & Hilla Becher Mel Bochner Sophie Calle Lee Friedlander Adam Fuss Nan Goldin Katy Grannan Peter Hujar Idris Khan Richard Learoyd Sol LeWitt Christian Marclay Ralph Eugene Meatyard Richard Misrach Nicholas Nixon Irving Penn Alec Soth Hiroshi Sugimoto Garry Winogrand and others

fraenkel gallery 49 geary street san francisco 415.981.2661 fraenkelgallery.com

May 12, 2016

7

Who Is Xi? Andrew J. Nathan More than halfway through his fiveyear term as president of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party—expected to be the first of at least two—Xi Jinping’s widening crackdown on civil society and promotion of a cult of personality have disappointed many observers, both Chinese and foreign, who saw him as destined by family heritage and life experience to be a liberal reformer. Many thought Xi must have come to understand the dangers of Party dictatorship from the experiences of his family under Mao’s rule. His father, Xi Zhongxun (1913– 2002), was almost executed in an innerParty conflict in 1935, was purged in another struggle in 1962, was “dragged out” and tortured during the Cultural Revolution, and was eased into retirement after another Party confrontation in 1987. During the Cultural Revolution, one of Xi Jinping’s half-sisters was tormented to the point that she committed suicide. Jinping himself, as the offspring of a “capitalist roader,” was “sent down to the countryside” to labor alongside the peasants. The hardships were so daunting that he reportedly tried to escape, but was caught and sent back.

No wonder, then, that both father and son showed a commitment to reformist causes throughout their careers. Under Deng Xiaoping, the elder Xi pioneered the open-door reforms in the southern province of Guangdong and played an important part in founding the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen. In 1987 he stood alone among Politburo members in refusing to vote for the purge of the liberal Party leader Hu Yaobang.

The younger Xi made his career as an unpretentious, pragmatic, pro-growth manager at first in the countryside and later in Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shanghai, three of China’s provincial units that were most open to the outside world.

In the final leg of his climb to power he was chosen in preference to a rival leader, Bo Xilai, who had promoted Cultural Revolution–style policies in the megacity of Chongqing.

For all these reasons, once Xi acceded to top office he was widely expected to pursue political liberalization and market reform. Instead he has reinstated many of the most dangerous features of Mao’s rule: personal dictatorship, enforced ideological conformity, and arbitrary persecution.

The key to this paradox is Xi’s seemingly incongruous veneration of Mao. Xi’s view of Mao emerges in the official biography of his father compiled by Party scholars, whose first volume was published when Xi was close to achieving supreme power and whose second came out after he had become Party general secretary and state president.

Describing the elder Xi’s near execution in 1935, the book says that Mao saved his life, ordering his release with the remark that heads are not like scallions: if you cut them off they will not grow back. Mao then promoted Xi’s career as an official in Yan’an and as a top bureaucrat in Beijing after 1949.

With respect to Xi’s purge in 1962, the biography blames Mao’s secret police chief, Kang Sheng, rather than Mao himself, and claims that Mao pro8

Xi Jinping

tected Xi by sending him to a job in a provincial factory safely away from the political storms in Beijing. When the Cultural Revolution broke out a few years later and Red Guards “dragged out” Xi from this factory job to subject him to the physical abuse and denunciation called “struggle,” the biography says that Mao’s premier Zhou Enlai had Xi imprisoned in a military barracks near Beijing as a way of protecting him. These stories have doubtless been massaged to show Mao as Xi wants him to be shown. But they are grounded in historical reality and help to explain the complexity of Xi’s relationship to Mao’s legacy. As Xi said years later, “If Mao had not saved my father’s life, I would not be here today.”

X

i’s respect for Mao is not a personal eccentricity. It is shared by many of the hereditary Communist aristocrats who,

as Agnès Andrésy points out in her book on Xi, form most of China’s top leadership today as well as a large section of its business elite. Deng Xiaoping in 1981 declared that Mao’s contributions outweighed his errors by (in a Chinese cliché) “a ratio of 7 to 3.” But in practice Deng abandoned just about everything Mao stood for. Contrary to the Western consensus that Deng saved the system after Mao nearly wrecked it, Xi and many other red aristocrats feel that it was Deng who came close to destroying Mao’s legacy.

Their reverence for Mao is different from the simple nostalgia of former Red Guards and sent-down youth who hazily remember a period of adolescent idealism. Rather, as the pro- democracy thinker Li Weidong writes in a muchdiscussed online essay, “The ‘Road of Red Empire’ That Cannot Be Traversed,” the children of the founding elite see themselves as the inheritors

BOOKS AND ARTICLES DRAWN ON FOR THIS ESSAY Xi Zhongxun zhuan [Biography of Xi Zhongxun] by the Editorial Committee for the Biography of Xi Zhongxun.

Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, two volumes, 1,283 pp. (2013)

Zoubutong de “hongse diguo zhilu” [The “Road of Red Empire” That Cannot Be Traversed] an article by Li Weidong.

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of an “all-under-heaven,” a vast world that their fathers conquered under Mao’s leadership. Their parents came from poor rural villages and rose to rule an empire. The second generation is privileged to live in a country that has “stood up” and is globally respected and feared. They do not propose to be the generation that “loses the empire.”

It is this logic that drives Liu Yuan, the son of former president Liu Shaoqi, whom Mao purged and sent to a miserable death, to support Xi in reviving Maoist ideas and symbolism; and the same logic has moved the offspring of many of Mao’s other prominent victims to form groups that celebrate Mao’s legacy, like the Beijing Association of the Sons and Daughters of Yan’an and the Beijing Association to Promote the Culture of the Founders of the Nation.

The princelings seem to invest literal biological meaning in the “bloodline theory” of political purity that was popular among elite- offspring Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution: “If the father was a hero the son is a real man, if the father was a counterrevolutionary the son is a bad egg” (laozi yingxiong erzi haohan, laozi fandong erzi huaidan). They see no irony in cheering Xi Jinping’s attack on corrupt bureaucrats although Mao purged their own fathers as “capitalist roaders in power.” Mao’s purges they excuse as a mistake. But they see today’s bureaucrats as flocking to serve the Party because it is in power and not because they inherited a spirit of revolutionary sacrifice from their forebears. Such opportunists are worms eating away at the legacy of revolution.

The legacy is threatened by other forces as well. Xi holds office at a time when the regime has to confront a series of daunting challenges that have all reached critical stages at once. It must manage a slowing economy; mollify millions of laid-off workers; shift demand from export markets to domestic consumption; whip underperforming giant state- owned enterprises into shape; dispel a huge overhang of bad bank loans and nonperforming investments; ameliorate climate change and environmental devastation that are irritating the new middle class; and downsize and upgrade the military.

Internationally, Chinese policymakers see themselves as forced to respond assertively to growing pressure from the United States, Japan, and various Southeast Asian regimes that are trying to resist China’s legitimate defense of its interests in such places as Taiwan, the Senkaku islands, and the South China Sea.

Any leader who confronts so many

big problems needs a lot of power, and Mao provides a model of how such power can be wielded. Xi Jinping leads the Party, state, and military hierarchies by virtue of his chairmanship of each. But his two immediate predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, exercised these roles within a system of collective leadership, in which each member of the Politburo Standing Committee took charge of a particular policy or institution and guided it The New York Review

If the system is broken... what comes next?

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1

Cheng Li, “Xi Jinping’s Inner Circle (Part 4: The Mishu Cluster I),” China Leadership Monitor, No. 46 (Winter 2015). Additional footnotes appear in the Web version of this essay at www .nybooks.com.

2

James Mulvenon, “The Yuan Stops Here: Xi Jinping and the ‘CMC Chairman Responsibility System,’” and Cheng Li, “Xi Jinping’s Inner Circle (Part 5: The Mishu Cluster II),” China Leadership Monitor, No. 47 (Summer 2015).

10

or giving one. The propaganda agencies labor to generate a huggable image of “Daddy Xi,” and Xi appears to be genuinely popular among the public, although this is changing as the economy slows. 3 But his anticorruption campaign affecting a great many people has ground on, leading intellectual and official elites to read his expression as inscrutable and frightening.

Above all, Xi has followed Mao in the demand for ideological conformity. He has invoked Mao’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” in explaining why cultural and media workers must display “Party character” and serve as the Party’s “throat and tongue,” and has used the resolution that Mao wrote for the Party’s 1929 Gutian Conference to emphasize the importance of Party control of the army. He has warned Party members against “irresponsible talk” (wangyi) and academics against “universal values.” As David Shambaugh reports in his recent book China’s Future:

relationship appears to be boringly conventional; even in rumor- drenched Beijing nothing has surfaced to suggest that he is a sexual hedonist like Mao. (Nor has the rumor mill produced allegations that Xi is personally corrupt, although Bloomberg News found that his older sister and her husband have made a lot of money.4) And Xi is no revolutionary. He seeks neither to upend China nor to turn the clock back to rural communes and the planned economy. Rather, he has declared, it is forbidden to negate either of

also to reaffirm its loyalty to the Party and to him personally. The overarching purpose of reform is to keep the Chinese Communist Party in power.

Xi’s stated goal is for China to achieve “a moderately prosperous society” (xiaokang shehui) by the hundredth anniversary of the Party’s founding in 2021, and “a socialist modernized society” (shehuizhuyi xiandaihua shehui) by the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the PRC in 2049.

These aims may sound modest, but they are bold. The goal for 2049 is said to imply a per capita GDP of US$30,000, and Chinese planners estimate that if it is achieved China will produce over 30 percent of the world’s GDP in that year, about one and a half times more than the proportion currently produced by the United States. That would generate a great deal of global power. However, 2049 is still a long way off.

For now, Xi will not hesitate to strike back if he believes the country’s “core interests” around its periphery are at stake, but his priorities are fundamentally domestic.

Ai Weiwei/Private Collection/Ai Weiwei Studio

without much interference from other senior officials.

This model does not produce leadership sufficiently decisive to satisfy Xi and his supporters. So Xi has sidelined the other members of the Politburo Standing Committee, except for the propaganda chief Liu Yunshan and the anticorruption watchdog Wang Qishan. He has taken the chairmanship of the most important seven of the twentytwo “leading small groups” that guide policy in specific areas. These include the newly established Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reform, which has removed management of the economy from Premier Li Keqiang. And Xi has created a National Security Council to coordinate internal security affairs.

Xi emulates Mao in exercising power through a tight circle of aides whom he can trust because they have demonstrated their personal loyalty in earlier phases of his career, such as Li Zhanshu, director of the all-powerful General Office of the CCP Central Committee. As the scholar Cheng Li reported in China Leadership Monitor, Li Zhanshu published an article in September 2014, stating that work as an aide in formulating policy requires “absolute loyalty” and that staff in the General Office “should act and think in a manner highly consistent . . .with the order from the Central Committee led by General Secretary Xi Jinping.”1 Xi’s protégés occupy crucial positions in the bureaucracies responsible for security, for supervising official careers, and for propaganda. Unlike powerful staff members in recent previous administrations, his aides avoid contact with foreigners and even with officials outside Xi’s personal circle.

Xi has also followed Mao’s model in protecting his rule against a coup. His anticorruption campaign has made him numerous enemies, and there have been rumors of assassination attempts. However, as pointed out by James Mulvenon and Cheng Li, respectively, Xi has tightened direct control over the military by means of what is called a “[Central Military Commission] Chairman Responsibility System,” and he controls the central guard corps—which monitors the security of all the other leaders—through his longtime chief bodyguard, Wang Shaojun.2 In these ways Xi controls the physical environment of the other leaders, just as Mao did through his loyal follower Wang Dongxing.

Xi conveys Napoleonic selfconfidence in the importance of his mission and its inevitable success. In person he is said to be affable and relaxed. But his carefully curated public persona follows Mao in displaying a stolid presence and immobile features that seem to convey either stoicism or implacability, depending on whether he is sitting through a boring speech

There has been an unremitting crackdown on all forms of dissent and social activists; the Internet and social media have i has made himself in some been subjected to much tighter ways more powerful than Deng controls; Christian crosses and or even Mao. Deng had the final churches are being demolished; word on difficult policy issues, Uighurs and Tibetans have been but he strove to avoid involvesubject to ever-greater persecument in day-to- day policy, and tion; hundreds of rights lawwhen forced to make big deciyers have been detained and sions he first sought consensus put on trial; public gatherings among a small group of senior are restricted; a wide range of Ai Weiwei: Mao (Facing Forward), 1986; leaders. Mao was able to take any publications are censored; forfrom the exhibition ‘Andy Warhol /Ai Weiwei,’ decision he wanted regardless of eign textbooks have been ofwhich originated at the National Gallery of Victoria, the will of his senior colleagues, ficially banned from university Melbourne, and will be at the Andy Warhol Museum, but he paid attention to only a classrooms; intellectuals are Pittsburgh, June 4–August 28, 2016. The catalog few issues at a time. Xi appears to under tight scrutiny; foreign is edited by Max Delany and Eric Shiner be running the whole span of imand domestic NGOs have been and published by Yale University Press. subjected to unprecedented portant policies on a daily basis, governmental regulatory preswithout needing to consult senior sures and many have been forced the “two thirty years”—that is, Mao’s colleagues or retired elders. to leave China; attacks on “foreign era and then the post-Mao reform peHe may go even further. There are hostile forces” occur with regularriod. China must combine Maoist firmhints that he will seek to break the ity; and the “stability maintenance” ness with modernizing reform. recently established norm of two fivesecurity apparatchiks have blanThe reform he has in mind, however, year terms in office and serve one or keted the country. . . . China is is different from what many observers, even more extra terms. He has had today more repressive than at any both Chinese and Western, would like. himself designated as the “core” of the time since the post-Tiananmen After his rise to power, the first policy leadership, a status that his immediate 1989–1992 period. manifesto issued by his regime stated predecessor, Hu Jintao, did not take for that “markets should play the decisive himself. At this point in a leader’s first role in the allocation of resources,” but term we would expect to see one or two ut Xi is different from Mao in imit has become clear that market forces younger politicians emerging as poportant ways. He has more accurate are intended as a tool to invigorate, tential heirs apparent, to be anointed information than Mao did, thanks to rather than to kill off, the “national at next year’s nineteenth Party Conextensive, organized, and professional champion” state- owned enterprises gress, but such signs are absent. One systems of intelligence and analysis, and state financial institutions that of the rumors circulating in Beijing is and thanks to what he has gathered continue to enjoy state patronage and that teams of editors are compiling a during his travel at home and abroad. to make up a large part of the economy. book of Xi’s “thought” (sixiang), which He uses inner-Party star chambers Xi understands these as pillars of state would place him on a level with Mao as and charges of corruption rather than power and would never hand control a contributor to Sino-Marxist theory, screaming Red Guards and accusaof the economy to enterprises that the a status not claimed by any of Mao’s tions of revisionism to purge rivals, Party does not control. other successors to date. and the political police rather than a Xi wants “rule by law,” but this Xi’s concentration of power poses mass movement to repress dissidents. means using the courts more energetigreat dangers for China. No one put Mao was a thinker and literary stylist; cally to carry out political repression it better than Deng Xiaoping, in a Xi has banal ideas but is more deliberand change the bureaucracy’s style of speech, “On the Reform of the System ate and consistent in decision-making. work. He wants to reform the univerof Party and State Leadership,” delivHis personal habits appear to be orsities, not in order to create Westernered on August 18, 1980: derly, compared to Mao’s chaotic ways style academic freedom but to bring of spending time. After a brief, failed academics and students to heel (inOver- concentration of power is lifirst marriage Xi settled down with cluding those studying abroad). He has able to give rise to arbitrary rule Peng Liyuan, a well-known singer who launched a thorough reorganization of by individuals at the expense of made her career in the military. Their the military, which is intended partly collective leadership, and it is an to make it more effective in battle, but important cause of bureaucracy 3 under the present circumstances. . . .

The term Xi Dada uses the character 4 There is a limit to anyone’s knowlSee “Xi Jinping Millionaire Relations for “big” as in “Big-big Xi.” In various edge, experience and energy. If a Reveal Fortunes of Elite,” Bloomberg dialects it means father, grandfather, or uncle Xi. News, June 29, 2012. person holds too many posts at the

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same time, he will ďŹ nd it difďŹ cult to come to grips with the problems in his work and, more important, he will block the way for other more suitable comrades to take up leading posts.

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS: THE HOLBERG PRIZE 2017 The Holberg Board is inviting nominations for the Holberg Prize 2017. The Prize is awarded annually to a scholar who has made outstanding contributions to research in the arts and humanities, social sciences, law or theology. The prize amount is NOK 4.5 million (appr. GBP 380.000).

Nomination deadline: 15th June, 2016.

Photo: Stephanie Mitchell

2016 HOLBERG LAUREATE STEPHEN GREENBLATT As an author, scholar and literature professor, Stephen Greenblatt has been one of the most distinctive and influential voices in the humanities for four decades. He is awarded the Holberg Prize for his impact on the practices of history, literary studies and cultural criticism. Greenblatt is regarded as one of the most important Shakespeare and Renaissance scholars of his generation. He is also the founder of New Historicism. The award will be conferred during a ceremony in Bergen, Norway, on 8th June.

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It was to avoid these problems that Deng built a system of tacit norms by which senior leaders were limited to two terms in ofďŹ ce, members of the Politburo Standing Committee divided leadership roles among themselves, and the senior leader made decisions in consultation with other leaders and retired elders.

By overturning Deng’s system, Xi is hanging the survival of the regime on his ability to bear an enormous workload and not make big mistakes. He seems to be scaring the mass media and ofďŹ cials outside his immediate circle from telling him the truth. He is trying to bottle up a growing diversity of social and intellectual forces that are bound to grow stronger. He may be breaking down, rather than building up, the consensus about China’s path of development among economic

and intellectual elites and within the political leadership. By directing corruption prosecutions at a retired Politburo Standing Committee member, Zhou Yongkang, and retainers of other retired senior ofďŹ cials, he has broken the rule that retired leaders are safe once they leave ofďŹ ce, throwing into question whether it can ever be safe for him to leave ofďŹ ce. As he departs from Deng’s path, he risks undermining the adaptability and resilience that Deng’s reforms painstakingly created for the post-Mao regime.

As the members of the red aristocracy around Xi circle their wagons to protect the regime, some citizens retreat into religious observance or private consumption, others send their money and children abroad, and a sense of impending crisis pervades society. No wonder Xi’s regime behaves as if it faces an existential threat. Given the power and resources that he commands, it would be reckless to predict that his attempt to consolidate authoritarian rule will fail. But the attempt risks creating the very political crisis that it seeks to prevent.

NEAR THE NEW WHITNEY In the Meatpacking District, Not far from the new Whitney, In a charming restaurant, I showed how charming I can be.

I showed how blue my eyes can be.

I showed I can be Dante ďŹ rst catching sight of Beatrice.

The maÎtre d’ was new to me.

The sudden sight of her, so gently lovely, Threw me at the pressed-tin ceiling, where I stuck.

I asked her where I was, her name was Emily.

I don’t know who the ceiling was.

I doubt pressed-tin was what it was.

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I was moonstruck.

Now I could only look up.

American art used to be risky.

American art used to be frisky And drink a lot of whiskey.

I looked up at Emily, not far from the new Whitney.

Seventy years ago, There were violently drunkard painters downtown who, Many of them, painted violently In the Hamptons also.

Now they were in the splendid new Whitney, dead Instead.

I wished I had a sled dog’s beautiful eyes, One blue, one brown, To mush across the blizzard whiteout Of sexy chirping chicks and well-trimmed Bearded white young men.

You see how blue my old eyes aren’t.

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12

I drank an after-dinner tumbler of whiskey Not far from the new Whitney, A present from the maÎtre d’.

Sweet Lagavulin single malt ďŹ lled me with inďŹ nity Sixteen years old, while the girl Smiled softly.

—Frederick Seidel

The New York Review

A WORLDWIDE EXCLUSIVE

Lead Corporate Sponsors:

THROUGH MAY 10

Conservation Sponsor:

Lead support has been provided by the Estate of Jacquet McConville. Major support has been generously provided by Caryn and King Harris, The Harris Family Foundation; the Gilchrist Foundation; The Morris and Dolores Kohl Kaplan Fund; and Evonne and John Yonover. Additional funding has been contributed by Constance and David Coolidge, the Mason Foundation, Charlene and Mark Novak, and the Comer Family Foundation. Annual support for Art Institute exhibitions is provided by the Exhibitions Trust: Kenneth Griffin, Robert M. and Diane v.S. Levy, Thomas and Margot Pritzker, Betsy Bergman Rosenfield and Andrew M. Rosenfield, the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation, and the Woman’s Board. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Vincent van Gogh. The Bedroom (detail), 1889. Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection.

May 12, 2016

13

Degas Invents a New World Cleveland Museum of Art

Anka Muhlstein

Edgar Degas: Frieze of Dancers, oil on canvas, circa 1895

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, March 26–July 24, 2016.

Catalog of the exhibition edited

by Jodi Hauptman.

Museum of Modern Art, 239 pp., $50.00 Edgar Degas was a paradoxical man, disconcerting in both his actions and his appearance. “With his silk hat on his head, his blue spectacles over his eyes—not to forget the umbrella—he is the image of a notary, a bourgeois of the time of Louis-Philippe,” according to Paul Gauguin. A notary, really? Not to the eyes of Paul Valéry, who describes him opening the door of his atelier, “shuffling about in slippers, dressed like a pauper, his trousers hanging, never buttoned.” The portrait painter Jacques-Émile Blanche saw him as neither a bourgeois nor an artist, but as a platoon commander on a drill field; if he makes a gesture, that gesture is imperious, as expressive as his hand in drawing; but he quickly retreats to a pose as defensive as that of a woman concealing her nakedness, the habit of a solitary soul who veils or protects his personality.

Degas himself, toward the end of his life, nearly blind, painted a self-portrait and said that he looked like an old dog, while his friend the sculptor Bartholomé found him to be “more beautiful than ever, like an old Homer with his eyes fixed on eternity.”

He never had one quality without having its opposite: Degas could be charming or unpleasant. He possessed—and affected—the worst possible disposition; yet there were days when he was quite unpredictably delightful.

Such was the opinion of Valéry. A confirmed bachelor with a thirst for tidiness, he dreamed, as he told his friend Henri Rouart, of “having everything, well organized (à la Poussin),” but he 14

was perfectly capable, although he spent days at a time alone in his atelier, of painting in the pandemonium of a family home like his brother’s, in Louisiana, “in an impossible light, constantly disturbed, with models full of affection but a little sans-gêne,” or at the home of the Morisot family where, in the midst of the comings and goings of a stream of visitors, he quickly completed a ravishing portrait of Berthe Morisot’s sister, Yves. Degas’s work was of such complexity that he had difficulty letting it go while he could still glimpse a vast array of possibilities that he was determined to explore. He was capable of revising a dancer’s leg ten or twenty times and then just one last time but, as Valéry put it, had political views that were simple, peremptory, and essentially Parisian. . . . With the advent of the Dreyfus affair, he was quite beside himself. He would bite his nails.

He would listen for the slightest hint of what he suspected, would burst out, make a clean break at once: “Adieu monsieur . . .” and turn his back on the enemy forever.

He broke off all relations with a lifelong friend, Ludovic Halévy, who was the librettist of Carmen and of successful operettas by Offenbach, as well as the author of novels such as Les Petites Cardinal that Degas had illustrated, because one of Halévy’s guests at a dinner party had expressed a favorable opinion of Dreyfus. He only saw Halévy again on his deathbed.

He

often struck fear into people, Blanche noted, not merely because of the cutting jibes he was accustomed to make, but even more because his hostility was frequently so incomprehensible. He tried to explain himself to the painter Évariste de Valernes, who appears with him in a self-portrait he did in 1865: I was or I seemed to be hard with everyone through a sort of an inclination toward brutality, which came from my uncertainty and my

bad humour. I felt myself so badly made, so badly equipped, so weak, whereas it seemed to me, that my calculations on art were so right. I sulked against the whole world and against myself.

Degas was a loner. He had always felt alone. Alone because of his character, alone because of his unyielding principles, alone because of his severe judgments. He pushed this taste for a cloistered life to the limits of absurdity.

His reaction to a laudatory article by Louis Ganderax, a respected and influential critic, was to cry out: Is painting something done to be put on show? You understand, one works for two or three living friends, and for others one has never met or who are dead. Is it any concern of a journalist whether I paint, make boots, or stitch list slippers? That’s my own business.

He exhibited with the Impressionists but he didn’t consider himself a member of the group, if for no other reason than that he violently rejected the very idea of painting outdoors. “If I were the government I would have a special brigade of gendarmes to keep an eye on the people who paint landscapes from nature,” he told the art dealer Ambroise Vollard. And beneath the jest lurked a very firm conviction. He wrote to his friend the artist Pierre Georges Jeanniot: You have chosen to give us the air of the outdoors, the air we breathe, the open air. Well, a painting is first and foremost a product of the artist’s imagination, it should never be a copy . . . the air that we see in a painting by a master is never air that can be breathed.

He concluded with a phrase that might have been written by Proust: It’s all very well to copy what one sees, it’s much better to draw what one can see only in one’s memory.

That is a transformation in which one’s ingenuity toils hand in hand

with one’s memory. . . . You reproduce nothing but that which has made an impression upon you, which is to say, the necessary.

There your memories and your imagination are freed of the tyranny of nature.

Crushing bouts of depression led him to write: “A door shuts inside one and not only on one’s friends. One suppresses everything around one and once all alone one finally kills oneself, out of disgust,” and he added: “I thought there would always be enough time. . . . I stored up all my plans in a cupboard and always carried the key on me. I have lost that key.” At age fifty, he thought his career was at an end. The condition of his eyes was a constant source of torment. If he was so rash as to read a little in the morning he could not start working. “I am sliding rapidly down the slope and rolling I know not where, wrapped in many pastels, as if they were packing paper,” he confided to Bartholomé.

But he always bounded back and at age seventy he told Rouart: “You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there’s no point in working.”

D

egas’s curiosity, his desire to continue exploring, never ceased to spur him on. The MoMA exhibition “Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty,” organized by Jodi Hauptman, the senior curator of drawings and prints, with Karl Buchberg, senior conservator, is the first complete exhibition of his monotypes since the one at Harvard’s Fogg Museum in 1968, and it is indispensable for an understanding of his quest for new techniques, new subjects, and new forms.

The experimental method, which was part of the zeitgeist of the last third of the nineteenth century, suited him: there was something of the inventor in this bricoleur always ready to try something new, often for the pleasure of starting over from scratch when he finally hit a wall, toiling away in his atelier where, observed Valéry, “light and The New York Review

dust mingled happily [amid] a basin, a dull zinc bathtub, stale bathrobes . . . bottles, flasks, pencils, bits of pastel chalk . . . broken pots, odds and ends.”

Most important, it housed a press, now in the Musée de Montmartre, an indispensable tool for the creation of his monotypes, a technique that allowed him to renew himself by abandoning the classicism he had grown up with.

Degas described the monotype as a drawing made with greasy ink and put through a press. It is a print of which there is in theory one copy, followed in his case by another. The result sits somewhere between an original drawing and a print, but in fact it is neither the one nor the other. On a hard slick surface (usually a copper or zinc plate, or else a sheet of celluloid) covered with ink, Degas would remove the ink with a stroke of a brush or a pen, the end of an implement, the tip of a finger, or even a rag, allowing a line or a silhouette to appear. He would then lay a sheet of damp paper on the plate and run it through the press.

The proof thus obtained was in the “dark-field manner,” that is, with a dark background; if instead he drew with ink directly on the bare plate, the result was a light-field print. Contrary to customary practice, Degas wasn’t satisfied with just a single proof. He’d print a second one, known as a cognate or ghost print, much lighter, which he would enhance with pastel. He would then further transform the monotype, often modifying completely the original impression. These pairs of prints have in most cases been separated, and it was a considerable challenge to reassemble them. To give some idea of

how widely Degas’s oeuvre had been dispersed, suffice it to say that to show 176 works, the museum had to contact eighty-nine lenders. The labor was justified. One of the delights of the exhibition then is that it allows us to see a number of successive prints side by side.

Monotypes demanded great speed— it was necessary to work before the ink could dry—but it also made it possible to retouch the image right up to the last minute. As Richard Kendall points out in the catalog: Monotype seemed to invite experiment and improvisation as ink was freely added, subtracted, or variously manipulated in the studio. . . .

The artist was also able to modify or even completely transform his composition as he progressed by simply wiping ink away.

Degas enthusiastically plunged into all kinds of research in order to refine his method. The printmaker Marcellin Desboutin describes him in this period: Degas “is no longer a friend, a man, an artist! He’s a zinc or copper plate blackened with printer’s ink, and plate and man are flattened together by his printing press whose mechanism has swallowed him completely!” The audacity of his techniques was matched by the audacity of his subjects.

T

he exhibition gives prominence to the different sorts of nudes in Degas’s work: some are caricatural, others spring from a violent imagination, while still others are calmer and often

deeply moving. The nudes of the former variety, done in the light-field manner, are women in brothels, creatures more comic than obscene, set among a suggestive decor made up of mirrors, sofas, and unmade beds. In some cases, Degas rises above the sordidness of these situations to imagine scenes of slapstick comedy. In La Fête de la Patronne (The Name Day of the Madam; see illustration on page 16), the girls, naked, save for stockings and slippers, laugh as they give enormous bouquets to the madam—who in her cheap black dress looks like nothing so much as an old cook—and shower her with kisses. The astonishing framing allows, at the top left, for a belly and an arm extending a bunch of flowers to appear, while in the upper-right corner the large globes of the ceiling lamp look very much like breasts.

The girls aren’t pretty; their vulgarlooking faces frequently evoke dogs or apes, for instance in Waiting for the Client or Woman in a Bathtub. These are crude views of women in their workplace, though not at work since the client is absent. Only in a very few prints do we see a mild-manneredlooking fellow in a derby hat, hesitant and admiring rather than menacing.

These monotypes aren’t really made to provoke the viewers’ desire, unlike the pornographic photographs that were so common in this era and that circulated widely. The only genuinely erotic image in the series is that of the lesbians in Two Women—Scene from a Brothel: in a gray half-light, one woman is lying on her back while the other seems to swoop down.

When Degas focuses on dark-field

monotypes, he abandons any notion of the anecdotal, any clear allusions to the brothel, and becomes more brutal in his depiction, as Carol Armstrong writes in the catalog, of the faceless women . . .who use bidets and chamber pots, who bend over with their backsides to the viewer, whose legs are splayed, whose hastily limned gestures may be masturbatory. . . . All decorum is relinquished, all sublimation renounced, all inhibition surrendered. . . .

The contrast between shadow and light and the extreme importance of the black tones all work together to create shapes that seem to emerge from a dream or a nightmare. There are certain disturbing, often perverse poses, but the fact that we never see the woman’s face confers on the image a certain ambiguous reticence.

These monotypes, which Degas always refused to present to the public, invite us to reflect on his relationship with women, an obsessive theme in his work that mixed attraction and disgust.

This misanthrope admitted at times that “living alone, without a family, is really too hard. I never would have suspected it would have caused me so much suffering.” But he never tried to remedy the situation. Berthe Morisot recalls that at a gathering at the Manets’ home, M. Degas came and sat beside me, pretending that he was going to court me, but this courting was confined to a long commentary on

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15

Musée Picasso, Paris

Solomon’s proverb: “Woman is the desolation of the righteous.”

S

ince the general public of the present day thinks of Degas as first and foremost a painter of milliners, laundresses, dancers, and race horses, for many visitors these landscapes will come as a revelation. That was true during his lifetime, too. His closest friends, the Halévys among them, were flabbergasted to learn in 1892 that he was about to exhibit twenty- one landscapes, since he’d never done one before. The Halévys’ surprise was understandable: after all, he had always made fun of outdoor painters. “Painting is not a sport” was the view he tossed at Ernest Rouart, who roamed the countryside in search of subjects.

Even wearing his tinted lenses, he couldn’t stand intense light and he decreed that the sight of the sea was too Monet for his eyes. No one had ever seen him do a sketch at a racetrack. In a conversation with Halévy, Degas explained that during a number of summer train trips he’d stood in the door “and as the train went along I could see things vaguely. That gave me the idea of doing some landscapes.” “Reflections of your soul?” asked Halévy.

“A reflection of my eyesight,” replied Degas.*

*Daniel Halévy, My Friend Degas, translated by Mina Curtiss (Wesleyan University Press, 1964), p. 66. Here, too, it is hard not to think of Proust’s narrator, fascinated by the changes in view seen from the window of his passenger compartment, spending his time “[à] rentoiler les fragments intermittents et opposites de [s]on beau matin écarlate et versatile.” Proust, 16

Degas’s last monotypes date from the

Edgar Degas: The Name Day of the Madam, pastel over monotype on paper, circa 1877–1879

Odder still, Degas’s only personal exhibition was in fact devoted precisely to those landscapes and it was held at the Durand-Ruel gallery just a few months after the exhibition of Monet’s Poplars series. As Richard Kendall has written: For Degas, it offered a characteristic moment of contrary revelation, reminding critics and fellow-artists of his continuing vitality, while cheerfully upsetting most of their preconceptions about his oeu-

À la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Pléiade, Gallimard, 1988), Vol. 2, p.

16. The D. J. Enright revision of Terence Kilmartin’s reworking of C. K. Scott Montcrieff’s translation reads thus: “I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever- changing morning.” Additional footnotes appear in the Web version of this review at www .nybooks.com.

vre. In the galleries where Monet had triumphed . . . Degas now presumed to show his own “series of monotypes,” each devoted to the landscape and each engaged with a similar “flood of changing and inter-related sensations, apparent in the face of a changeless spectacle.”

In a letter to his sister, he described these landscapes as imaginary and emphasized his lack of interest in accurate description. According to Valéry he did sketches of rocks indoors, taking as models pieces of coal he extracted from his stove. He was certainly capable of conjuring up from his remarkable memory different aspects of nature and producing in his atelier unambiguous landscapes, but the monotype technique pushed him toward other horizons. One of the themes of the exhibition is repetition and transformation, and nowhere is the transformation as radical as it is in the landscapes.

For these landscapes, Degas, always eager to innovate, no longer used black

1890s but the practice of that form of etching had a lasting influence. You can see it in the last room in the show, devoted to his later works. Most of them are unfinished. But Degas had always had a hard time admitting that a painting was finished. Even after it was sold, an artwork could always be revised.

His friend Henri Rouart learned this at his own expense. He had purchased a pastel that he dearly loved. Sometime later, Degas came to dinner and left with the pastel under his arm, to spruce up a detail. Rouart never saw his painting again. Degas revised it to such an extent that it was ruined.

In the works of his last years, one is struck by Degas’s obsession with certain poses, poses that he reproduced with a growing freedom, making use of every medium at his disposal, charcoal, pastel, and oil paints. With unrelenting obstinacy, he dreamed up all the possible variations of specific gestures, whether it was the arm of a dancer adjusting her strap, reminiscent of the gesture of a woman straining to dry the back of her neck or sponge her shoulders, the bending of a leg, the curve of a back. At this point, he literally seemed to be manipulating the body of his model, rather than drawing it. In Frieze of Dancers, four girls adjust their slippers: they’re all doing the same thing and yet each is doing something different (see illustration on page 14). Here, Valéry recognized a similarity to the task of the writer, Private Collection

Perhaps he really believed this was the case, for he never had a lasting attachment.

But other nudes, gentler, more sensitive, and in particular the series Couchers ou des Levers (Going to Bed or Getting Up), show once again just to what extent Degas was able to do one thing and its opposite. These women, as if glimpsed through a keyhole, chastely wearing their nightcaps, are more evocative of seventeenth- century Holland than of mocking or erotic views of lowlife Paris. Sometimes, Degas would pass from one world to another with the same image as the point of departure.

For instance, the first proof of Woman in a Bathtub shows an ugly woman in squalid surroundings while the second one, overlaid in pastel, gave him a chance to retouch the face, to decorate the bathroom walls, and to create a cozy atmosphere. He undertook a comparable transformation in his treatment of the second proof of Woman Going to Bed. In the first, the woman is scarcely sketched out and the decor is nondescript. In the second, the body is admirably drawn, the carpet has been created by the artist’s fingerprints, and the far wall and the bedclothes have real substance. These continual alterations become even more surprising in Degas’s landscapes.

ink but instead made use of colored, more fluid inks, a technique that no one had tried before him. The element of chance was reinforced by the fact that he couldn’t control the flow of the ink under the press, and the result was an abandonment of all realism. Does Le Cap Ferrat, a shape bounded by impressions of an exquisite delicacy, depict an imaginary map of a peninsula, a mythical fish, or simply a patch of color open to any and all interpretation? In connection with an exhibition of his landscapes at the Metropolitan Museum in 1994, John Updike wrote very accurately in these pages that Degas’s “formal manners belong to the nineteenth century, but his artistic ruthlessness and freedom to the twentieth,”which brings us back to the impossibility of “classifying” Degas.

striving to attain the utmost precision of form, drafting and redrafting, canceling, advancing by endless recapitulation, never admitting that his work has reached its posthumous stage: so too Degas from sheet to sheet, tracing to tracing, he continually revises his drawing. He digs into it, squeezes and envelops it.

Edgar Degas: Wheatfield and Line of Trees, pastel over monotype in oil on paper, 1890

Thus ends an exceptionally complex and intriguing exhibition, which makes the best possible use of an array of works seldom seen in one place. Together they constitute a genuine portrait of the artist.

—Translated from the French by Antony Shugaar The New York Review

Central Park Trees and Landscapes

Industry and Intelligence

A Guide to New York City’s Masterpiece

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Contemporary Art Since 1820

A major artist reframes the making of modern art as a response to soft revolutions in science, politics, and technology.

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—Booklist

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After the Manifesto

Dark Space

Group Efforts

The Arab City

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Architecture, Representation, Black Identity

Changing Public Space

Architecture and Representation

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Interviews with Hayal Pozanti, Todd Shalom, Greta Hansen, Adam Koogler, Kyung-Jae Kim, Moving beyond reductive notions and Karen Finley, with an essay by Mabel of identity, myths of authenticity, Wilson. fetishized traditionalism, or the Acetate ďŹ lm, an exhaust fan, lollipops, constructed opposition of tradition a bicycle, paper and pens—in Group and modernity, The Arab City: Efforts: Changing Public Space, vital Architectural and Representation voices in art and design use everyday critically engages contemporary objects to transform surroundings in architectural and urban production remarkable ways. 30 color plates. in the Middle East. Taking the “Arab Cityâ€? and “Islamic Architectureâ€? as sites of investigation rather than given categories, this book reframes the region’s buildings, cities, and landscapes and broadens its architectural and urban canons. Color illustrations throughout. Coming in June 2016.

Does the recent explosion of the architectural manifesto signal a new urgency of the form, or does it represent a hopeless effort to resuscitate something that has outlived its useful lifespan? After the Manifesto brings together architects and scholars to revisit the past, present and future of the manifesto.

In what ways have manifestos transformed the ďŹ eld over the last 50 years, and in what ways has the manifesto itself been transformed by new modes of communication?

Authors include Ruben Alcolea, Craig Buckley, Beatriz Colomina, Carlos Labarta, Felicity D. Scott, Bernard Tschumi, Anthony Vidler, Enrique Walker, and Mark Wigley. Color and b&w illustrations throughout.

This collection of essays by architect Mario Gooden investigates the construction of African American identity and representation through the medium of architecture. Blackand-white illustrations throughout.

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May 12, 2016

17

Cuba: The Big Change Alma Guillermoprieto

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There was a history of US-Cuban relations before that, too, and every Cuban remembers its bitterness. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was the United States’ imperial adventure in the Caribbean. It did not end when, after three years of occupation, Cuba agreed to sign the Platt Amendment.

Essentially, the amendment allowed the US to take over Guantánamo and obligated Cuba to consult with and obey the US at every move. It was in force for thirty-three years. It’s impossible to understand the long hold Fidel Castro had on the imagination

Nothing could be wasted: the hangers in the bedroom closet whose lower wire had rusted away had been carefully clipped so that the remains could still be used to hang blouses on. Every wall was a different color, according to what small amount of paint the owner had been able to scavenge on a given day. All this was the best the Cuban economy could provide in the bonanza years of the twenty-first century, and only because the owner had relatives abroad who could help finance the apartment’s renovation. “Now with Obama,” the owner said, in expecta-

How many mistakes can safely be corrected? When the house you live in is falling apart, how much can you tinker with the plumbing, the windows, the door jambs, and the supporting walls before the whole edifice collapses around you? This is the question whose answer Raúl Castro has been exploring since he came to power eight years ago.

R

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times/Redux

One could swear that nothing has changed. The chaotic lines we travelers form in front of Cuba’s stern immigration officers; their belligerent slowness; the noise and heat in the too-small room; the echoing shouts across the room from one olive-green-clad person to another (an argument or a conversation about the lunch menu, in Cuba one can never tell which); the parents who stand patiently in line with their children, waiting for them to go berserk.

Still to come is the long line to have our hand luggage inspected, and the longer wait for our checked bags, which, mysteriously, aren’t inspected at all, and the exit line that will take us from purgatory into Cuba at last, but not before we’ve done one final penance waiting for a driver who never arrives, and another ten minutes for a shot of coffee that likewise never arrives, and one last relatively brisk line to change dollars into the confounding Cuban currency-for-foreigners, and a short line for transportation that some three hours after landing is about to take us, finally, into Havana.

And throughout, the increasingly irritated question: Why does it have to be like this? Why, for the fifty-seven years since Fidel Castro rode into Havana at the head of a scruffy rebel army, has it always had to be like this? Really, one could swear that nothing has changed.

And then, BOOM ! the new reality.

The driver of my spiffy yellow checkered taxi blasts on the air conditioner and lowers the window to shout the week’s hit song into the tropical air. He has the manner of someone on a steady diet of coke or Coke, pays no attention to me, fiddles with the radio dial, shouts out another song, nearly sideswipes five ancient cars in quick succession, skids to a halt at my destination, a residencia particular where I have managed to find the last available room in the entire city, dumps out my luggage, and screeches away, on the prowl for more passengers, more guanikiki. You know: moolah, billete . . . money!

All around in the old, familiar rattletrap neighborhood of Vedado there are more surprises: the sidewalk in front of my building is being replaced; the house across the street is being repainted; the avenue we just turned off of is freshly asphalted; a construction crane is visible just behind a block of delicately collapsing Art Nouveau residences. Everything is changing, or about to change, or promising to change, because the biggest change of all is about to happen.

Barack Obama, leader of the Marxist Cuban state’s archenemy, is about to land for a state visit at the invitation of Cuban president Raúl Castro. The stock phrase being used in the press is that this is “the first visit by a sitting US president in eighty-eight years,” but of course that’s not the point. It’s the first visit since the Cuban Revolution, the first since the Bay of Pigs, the first since Fidel brought in the nuclear missiles that made the world freeze in fear of imminent nuclear annihilation in 1962, the first since the United States imposed fifty years of diplomatic and commercial isolation on an island with a population of eleven million.

President Obama with Cuban President Raúl Castro at a baseball game between the Cuban national team and the Tampa Bay Rays, Havana, March 2016

of so many of his compatriots—and so many disenfranchised citizens in Latin America—without this past. Cannily, and also wholeheartedly, he embodied the hero who led a heroic people in their fervent defiance of the Yanqui. Lest they slip in their convictions, a billboard in front of the former US embassy permanently shouted at the señores imperialistas that Cubans felt no fear of them whatsoever.

T

he anti-imperialist sign disappeared when Obama and Raúl officially reestablished relations in July 2015, and now a visitor might suspect that antiimperialist socialism has been replaced by a sort of cargo cult whose deity is Obama. What, I asked, was that enormous decrepit building in which children could be heard at play? It was a collapsing school that would soon be fixed. A gulch-like street, a dysfunctional distribution system, all would be fixed: Obama was coming!

The apartment I shared with a colleague reminded us constantly of how tough everyday life still is for Cubans, despite the changes. Far above the standard for the typical Cuban dwelling, it required constant coping. Nothing worked properly in the kitchen, starting with the sixty-year-old stove, whose burners went from gas-belcher to towering inferno in seconds. There were two knives, neither of which could cut through a pepper I’d stuck in my luggage. Water set to boil in a dented tin pot soon developed an oily gray skin. At night, one of Havana’s petsized cockroaches winked its antennae at me from behind a threadbare dishtowel.

tion of renewed trade between the two countries, “I hope I can really put this place together.”

The joke on everyone’s lips was that Obama should stay in Havana for a month, because in preparation for his three-day visit more had been done to fix up the place than in the previous half-century. In fact, the visit is happening because enormous change has already taken place, most of it at the urging of Raúl Castro, but there is only occasional grudging recognition of that. “Things are better,” an outspoken woman I know said, “but not enough.”

There is no more of the desperate hunger that afflicted everyone in the days following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Microwaves, rice cookers, and, most significantly, cell phones can all be legally purchased, and my outspoken acquaintance can shout her objections to the way things are at the top of her voice, not sharing my concern that someone might hear. (A concern that keeps me even now from identifying almost everyone in this story. The list of Cubans punished for speaking to foreign journalists is too long, and repression of the formal opposition too active, to take any sort of freedom of expression for granted.)

“What I want to know,” my acquaintance exclaimed loudly, “is why it takes the Revolution half a century to correct each mistake?” This is an exaggeration—there were mistakes, like the concentration camps for homosexuals and Seventh-Day Adventists set up in the 1960s, that were rectified in mere years instead of decades—but it is tangentially related to the question that must trouble the mind of those responsible for the huge current changes:

aúl Castro is the fourth of seven siblings born to a Cuban household cook and a poorly educated Spanish immigrant who made his fortune growing sugar cane on the eastern tip of Cuba— initially for the United Fruit Company.

Like his older brother Fidel, Raúl grew up as a judío, or Jew, the quaint term used by conservative Catholics in Cuba for unbaptized children. (Raúl’s father did not marry his mother until he was twelve, and so the Castro children could not be baptized.)

Raúl seems to have determined from the start that he could not be anything like his strapping, handsome, charismatic, brilliant brother. Small and unprepossessing, he did poorly at school and became expert at dominating the background. He was with Fidel during his rabble-rousing university days in Havana and at his spectacularly failed assault on a military barracks in the eastern city of Santiago in 1953. He was

by Fidel’s side during the exile years in Mexico, and also on the creaky old yacht that in 1956 carried several dozen men to their disastrous landing in a Cuban mangrove and subsequent near annihilation by the dictator Fulgencio Batista’s troops.

Along with Ernesto Guevara, known as Che, Fidel went on to create a guerrilla army—the Ejército Rebelde—in the island’s eastern mountains. In part because the United States withdrew its support from Batista, and also thanks to a courageous civilian opposition, the rebel army triumphed. On January 1, 1959, Batista fled Cuba, and one week later Fidel entered Havana. Raúl immediately and cheerfully ordered the execution without trial of several dozen of Batista’s alleged torturers and assassins. Raúl then went about the task of consolidating a military force capable of defending the island against a US invasion. For the next forty-eight years the younger brother pursued this task, keeping his opinions to himself and rarely appearing in public. Anyone who stopped to think about it, however, knew that he was inevitably the second-most-powerful man in the country.

Because he ran an army, it was assumed that he was rigid and unimaginative, but those close to the Castro brothers’ inner circle spoke of Raúl as the tolerant one, the one who made sure all family members were made welcome at the weekly meals hosted by him and his wife—a former debutante and MIT student who joined Fidel’s movement from the beginning.

Unlike his brother, he had a quick, self-deprecating sense of humor and a pragmatic turn of mind. In 2006, when Fidel was taken sick and announced his temporary retirement, positions in The New York Review

the National Assembly—the regime’s legislative body—were shuffled in order to place Raúl in the direct line of succession. Two years later, when it became evident that Fidel could no longer return to power, Raúl was confirmed as leader of the Cuban state.

The changes began immediately. “I won’t speak for very long,” said the man who had spent the better part of his life listening to his brother put others to sleep in the course of all-night monologues. And indeed, the newcomer has since distinguished himself by making few and short, to-the-point announcements, and then doing more or less what he says he’ll do. Since he took power, cell phones became legal, unused state land was turned over to private farmers, and for the first time in more than half a century ordinary Cubans have been able to purchase and sell property and travel abroad.

The Internet, so feared by hard-line conservatives in the government, became accessible to anyone with the money to pay for it, or the Cuban skills needed to get around the pay barrier.

Pornography, most foreign stories about Cuba, and local, independent online publications are still blocked.

Perhaps most importantly, within months after taking power, Raúl told the actor Sean Penn that he would consider meeting with Barack Obama if the then Democratic candidate were elected president.

Fidel’s brother has clearly been thinking ahead in a way the aging Fidelistas in the Cuban Communist Party have not. He may be trying to modernize Cuban socialism to the point where it is capitalist and open enough to ac-

commodate the restless generations who are now under forty-five years of age; he may be dreaming of something like a Norway-under-the-palm-trees or, more likely, China-on-a-daiquiri. Perhaps he has the sense that the revolution is finished, that there is no future in the old dogmas and failures, that sixty years of poverty and repression are enough, and that he has no real power to control the inevitable future.

Perhaps he is simply trying to ensure, finger in the dike, that a newly capitalist Cuba does not slide into a morass of corruption and cynicism.

Meanwhile, Raúl has internal opposition to face, starting with his brother, who still speaks for the old históricos in the Party. On the Monday following Obama’s visit Fidel published a meandering, querulous “reflection” about “Brother Obama,” whose point was hard to decipher, other than the fact that Obama trod Cuban ground not during his time in office. The gates for Fidelistas to air their irritation in virtually all the government-controlled media were thus opened, although by and large the protests are contorted pieces of writing, because they can attack Obama but not Raúl.

In a phone conversation from Mexico, the respected Cuban historian Rafael Rojas, who has not been allowed to return to his country since 1994 but studies it closely nevertheless, pondered the array of forces supporting and opposing Raúl Castro. “There is the [internationally recognized] opposition within Cuba,” Rojas said, “but it has little visibility inside Cuba because of its lack of access to media. Also— and this is a delicate subject because it

generates controversy—it is affected by the dynamic of its dependence on the US-Cuban opposition based in Miami.

However, there is another, invisible, opposition,” Rojas went on. “A reformist current within the various ministries sets itself apart not only from the orthodox, official line, but from Raúl himself. It believes that change must come more quickly.”

It’s not easy to see how the economic transition could go much faster: the difficulties are everywhere, and many people argue that without economic reform political reforms cannot prosper.

A recent online debate among economists in Cuba and abroad examined the vexing issue of the Cuban peso (CUPs)—what Cuban salaries are paid in—versus Cuban convertible pesos (CUC s), which are pegged to the US dollar and can be changed into foreign currency. They are worth about twentyfive times as much as the lowly peso.

With the peso, and their ration card, Cubans and only Cubans can go into one of the miserable bodegas that dot every neighborhood and get their ever-diminishing rations of soap, rice, beans, cooking oil, and not much more, and also buy the few extra things the bodega has for sale but not always, like fruit juice or batteries. It is now possible for Cubans to buy items with CUPs in formerly CUC -only stores. Everyone agrees that both currencies should be unified as soon as possible, but one problem is that peso items are heavily subsidized.

Then there is the question of the surplus value, to use an old Marxist term, that the Cuban government extracts from its workers. Although the

private sector has grown exponentially since Raúl Castro’s reforms, about 70 percent of the labor force still works for the state, earning an average of six hundred pesos—about $25—a month.

In recent years the state has allowed a skill-based range of wages for its workers, and so some doctors now make as much as $67 a month. By comparison, though, the owner of the private home I stayed in is allowed to charge, in CUC s, the equivalent of $35 a night per guest, in each of two bedrooms that are fairly steadily occupied by tourists.

Meanwhile, the state is taking in an estimated $2.5 billion a year by renting out its doctors to more than sixty different governments. But it only pays those doctors some $300 a month while their stint lasts, plus less than $200 that are deposited monthly in a Cuban account, as a sort of inducement to doctors to return home after their tour of duty. In essence, the urgent task of unifying the two currencies will require the government to stop budgeting in funny money, find enough income to raise wages from their current indecent levels, and somehow fend off the almost inevitable inflation that will follow.

A member of the Catholic opposition I talked to one morning pointed out that the full-throttle development Cuba needs will leave tremendous inequality in its path, and indeed, I couldn’t see how the future was going to be anything but grim for someone like a taxi driver I’ll call Marcelo, who drove me around a few times. He was old enough to remember “a little bit” of how bitter prerevolutionary times were for his family, who were poor and black.

Under Fidel, on the other hand, he had

Edgar Degas A Strange New Beauty Now on View

Lead sponsor of the exhibition is The Philip and Janice Levin Foundation.

Major support is provided by the Robert Lehman Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, and Denise Littlefield Sobel.

May 12, 2016

Generous funding is provided

by Mary M. Spencer and by Dian Woodner.

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Paint provided by Farrow & Ball.

Additional support is provided by the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund.

MoMA Audio+ is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Edgar Degas. Landscape with Rocks (Paysage avec rochers) (detail).

1892. Pastel over monotype in oil on paper. High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Purchase with High Museum of Art Enhancement Fund

The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street Manhattan moma.org

19

THE DARKENING TRAPEZE Larry Levis “Our Whitman for the late twentieth century.”—Terrance Hayes

WINDOW LEFT OPEN

But with each passing hour they grew bolder. Soon enough, buildings emptied and crowds gathered wherever the arrival of motorized police heralded an imminent sighting of POTUS. People cheered awkwardly, not quite sure how to express the thrill they felt.

There was similar awkwardness between the two leaders: smiles and friendly chatting that reporters with Obama noticed even beyond the photo-ops, and a press conference Raúl Castro found so annoying, baffling, unnecessary, and threatening that he talked to his son through the first reporter’s questions, which happened to be about human rights. Obama, in his cocky, king-of-the-hill mode, then insulted his aged host with a theatrical wink at the audience as the old man fumbled with his earphones. Eventu-

ber of Commerce, Carlos Gutiérrez, an exiled Cuban who as George W. Bush’s commerce secretary had campaigned hard against any rapprochement with the Castro regime. He came forward to intercept questions about human rights by assuring everyone that “the right to make a living” was a basic human right that would expand through US investment.

The excitement of the investment suitors and their sense of possibility were mirrored everywhere. Tourists strolled through Old Havana in their thousands, thrilled by the absolute newness of the place and relishing the absence of things that Cuba no doubt will soon acquire. Havana is the city where one is not chased and intruded on by loudspeakers blasting music in every store: there are no stores, or alMagnum Photos

gotten free health care, a good education, and served abroad in a diplomatic position; it was no wonder that he was a proud member of the Communist Party. Now retired, he owned a rusty, rattling Russian Lada, perhaps twenty years old, whose gearshift popped out of its box every time he accelerated.

The motor tended to go AWOL at stoplights, the floor of the trunk had rusted through, and the doors opened only from the outside.

There wasn’t much life left in the old thing, but Marcelo, in his healthy sixties, could still have two decades in front of him, on a government retirement income equivalent to $7 a month.

What was his future going to look like when his old workhorse gave out, now that the only way to make ends meet is to work for foreigners and get paid in CUC s? He didn’t answer the question, nor did he resume his usual cheery banter during the rest of the ride, and one could easily guess that his loyalties lay with Fidelista traditionalists rather than the reformist Raúl.1 Whether he sees this transition to its conclusion or gets swallowed up by it, Raúl Castro doesn’t have much time: he has announced his retirement following the general elections of 2018, when he will be eighty-six, and he is pressing for a two-term limit for all public officeholders. This, in fact, might be the only thing he and Barack Obama have in common: two leaders on their way out, bent on consolidating a legacy that their successors won’t be able to tear apart.

Jennifer Grotz “A contemplative spirit—calm but alert— permeates the poems.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

On the day of Obama’s arrival the

streets were weirdly empty, as if most of the people of Havana had decided to stay away from any potential trouble.2

1

99 POEMS: NEW & SELECTED Dana Gioia Newly appointed California Poet Laureate, “[Gioia] is well on the way to becoming a classic poet.”—Booklist

RAPTURE Sjohnna McCray Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.

20

The dissatisfaction with recent reforms felt by the rank-and-file of the Communist Party of Cuba is expected to be aired at the Seventh Party Congress, to take place on April 16–18.

Several articles in the official press have pointed out that the all-important Sixth Party Congress of 2011 approved dramatic economic reforms—allowing hundreds of thousands to work in the private sector, for example—only after extensive and effective consultation with the base of party members. There has been no equivalent lengthy discussion period prior to the Seventh Congress. A member of the reformist wing of the party I talked to countered the critics by saying that the current proposed reforms are merely extensions or improvements of the reforms approved in the 2011 Congress.

2 This wasn’t true of the well-known opposition group Ladies in White, who tried to march as usual down the Quinta Avenida. The Washington Post has a video online of what happened; see “Cuban Protestors Arrested Ahead of Obama Visit,” March 20, 2016. Primly, the security forces assigned female police to shove the female protesters into police vans. The protest group, well recognized abroad, has little visibility in Cuba because its actions are not mentioned in official media. Nor was there any news in the government press of the more than five hundred arrests of dissidents in the weeks prior to Obama’s visit. In virtually all cases these days, protesters are released after a few hours, although occasionally they are beaten or interrogated before their release. Additional footnotes appear in the Web version of this article at www .nybooks.com.

A living room in Havana with a poster of Fidel Castro at right, 2015; photograph by Carl De Keyzer from his book Cuba, La Lucha, which includes an essay by Gabriela Salgado and has just been published by Lannoo. His photographs are on view at the Roberto Polo Gallery, Brussels, through May 15.

ally, an angry Castro challenged the reporter to give him the names of any political prisoners and the press conference ground to its embarrassing end.

Although US media declared Obama the winner in the encounter, it hardly mattered that the presidents failed to charm each other or that Castro failed to win over the public. Obama is as skilled at public relations as any US politician, and the leader of a monolithic state hardly needs charm. Both sides got what they came for, which for the United States was to establish a mutually advantageous relationship with its neighboring country. For Cuba, it meant first and foremost doing away with the embargo, as Raúl Castro explained to Sean Penn years ago, but this will be for Congress, not Obama, to decide.

The major lobby for a change in the ground rules went to Cuba along with Obama. Warren Buffett was there, and Google too, along with the presidents of Paypal and Airbnb and representatives from various airlines who have negotiated the rights to land 110 flights from the United States to Havana every day. At a press briefing for journalists traveling with Obama, Deputy National Security Secretary Ben Rhodes added that GE and Caterpillar would like to persuade the Cuban government to buy their products. Also at the briefing was the chair of the US Cham-

most none. There are no advertisements; no traffic jams; no shopping malls; no twenty-four-hour Internet and its accompanying addictions; no supermarkets with their endless rows of choices. A vacation in Cuba is a respite from capitalism.

During the long, harsh decades under the regime created and led by Fidel Castro, these austerities were not a source of pride. What moved young people all over the world and what Cubans of the revolutionary period valued about themselves was instead their own resilience, their courage, and their spartan gift for unwavering commitment to a cause. Those days of heroic faith are over, and perhaps soon the reflex habit of repression will end too, and there will be no more political prisoners, who still number in the dozens, and no censorship. “Years ago it was difficult to hear our music [in Cuba] but here we are,” Mick Jagger said in decent Spanish. He was addressing an enormous crowd in Havana that gathered for a historic free concert by the Rolling Stones the day after Obama left. “Times are changing, no?”

Perhaps no other community felt the regime’s intolerance and persecution more consistently over the years than artists, but now they are finding a sense of renewed opportunity and purpose in the Cuban moment. In Old Havana an installation by the artist Felipe Dulzaides recreates the school of theater at The New York Review

“the greatest collection of post-impressionist and early modern art in america.”

–the economist

Books from the Barnes Foundation

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matisse in the barnes foundation edited by yve-alain bois

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An essay on Albert C. Barnes’s collecting and the development of his educational and display philosophies is followed by informative entries on over 150 works in the collection and commentary on some of its distinctive wall compositions.

The fifty-nine works by Henri Matisse in this catalogue raisonné represent every phase of his career and include Le Bonheur de vivre, also called The Joy of Life, and The Dance. Essays address the commission and evolution of The Dance and its role in the artist’s career; Barnes’s views on Matisse; how and why he collected Matisse’s work; and the latest scientific findings on the condition of Le Bonheur de vivre. An appendix containing the correspondence between artist and collector illuminates their relationship.

In 1913, Barnes wrote to Leo Stein, “I am convinced that I cannot get too many Renoirs and the next time I’m in Paris I’m going to go after some more.” In their catalogue raisonné of the 181 works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir acquired by Barnes, Lucy and House examine the artist’s modernity, the collector’s obsession with his work, and the dispersal of the works that were in Renoir’s studio at his death.

Published in association with SkiraRizzoli $40 african art in the barnes foundation: the triumph of l’art nègre and the harlem renaissance edited by christa clarke Barnes considered African sculpture the purest expression of three-dimensional form and collected over 120 examples, most of them from francophone colonies.

In an essay introducing the catalogue raisonné of the Foundation’s African holdings, Clarke examines their significance in its history, showing how Barnes’s lifelong commitment to the advancement of African Americans and his vision of social progress through education contributed to his promotion of African art and his involvement in the Harlem Renaissance.

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May 12, 2016

21

the legendary National Arts Schools, which survive in ruinous condition in the suburb of Cubanacán. The schools were a favorite project of Fidel Castro, who put the architect Ricardo Porro in charge of the project. Porro himself designed the dance and visual arts schools, and recruited two friends, the Italians Vittorio Garatti and Roberto

Gottardi, to design the music and ballet schools and the theater school, respectively. But the vanguard architecture of the schools was censored by the revolution before all the buildings could be finished.

Ricardo Porro died in Paris in 2014, Garatti returned to Italy years ago, and the school of theater survives in fragile

disrepair, as does its own wry eightynine-year-old architect, Roberto Gottardi, who still lives in Cuba. At the adventurous art gallery in Old Havana where Dulzaides is presenting his homage to the school and its architect, he showed me a video and photo installation, and an exquisite scale model of the school made by Gottardi’s stu-

dents. Now, perhaps, the National Arts Schools themselves might one day revive. “Gottardi has spent the last fiftytwo years trying to figure out how the theater school can be completed,” Dulzaides said. “To me, that is the perfect metaphor for the Cuban Revolution today.”

—April 13, 2016

Open the Cages!

Brent Herrig Photography

Peter Singer The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers Are Transforming the Lives of Animals

by Wayne Pacelle.

William Morrow, 352 pp, $26.99 When my article “Animal Liberation” appeared in these pages forty-three years ago, many people told me that we will not stop exploiting animals until we get rid of capitalism.* Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the country’s largest animal protection organization, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), takes the opposite view. In The Humane Economy he describes how “capitalism at its best” is a force against animal suffering, “applying human creativity to answer the demands of a morally informed market.”

Is he right? On the side of those who see capitalism as the problem, it has to be granted that in the United States the pressures of unrestrained competition drove traditional small farmers out of business. Those who knew their animals as individuals and didn’t want to move them indoors and confine them in crates or cages found they could no longer make a living from farming. For every egg producer there is today, forty years ago there were twenty. Over the same period the numbers of pig and dairy farmers have declined by 91 and 88 percent, respectively. Meanwhile the farms—or as the industry now calls them, “concentrated animal feeding operations”—have grown so much that the number of animals produced has soared from about 1.5 billion animals in 1960 to 9 billion today.

All the same, capitalism is not to blame. These changes have occurred because consumers buy factory-farmed animal products, either despite knowing what factory farming is like for the animals they eat, or without even asking what it is like. Speciesism, which leaves so many of us indifferent to the interests of animals, predates capitalism. It survives revolutions that lead to alternative economic systems, whether they be the state communism of the former Soviet Union or the more idealistic socialism of the Israeli kibbutzim.

In the United States, in contrast to the European Union, efforts to pass nationwide legislation to protect farmed animals have failed. Instead, advocates for animals have sought to educate consumers and then use the morally informed market to improve conditions for ani*The New York Review, April 5, 1973.

Additional footnotes appear in the Web version of this article at www .nybooks.com.

22

A young pig at J&D Farms, where the animals—raised for meat—roam in wooded lots and grassy paddocks, eating wild apples and foraging for tubers, Eaton, New York, June 2015

mals. The Humane Economy traces the economic impact of the public’s concern for animals across a wide range of animal abuses. As we would expect, the public is particularly concerned about dogs and cats, and Pacelle tells us how two pet store chains, PetSmart and Petco, have responded to this concern with a new economic model. Instead of selling dogs and cats, they now give animal rescue organizations space within their stores to offer animals in need of good homes. The stores lose revenue by not selling commercially bred animals and receive nothing from the adoptions, but more than make up for that from increased sales of pet supplies to their appreciative customers.

When Pacelle writes about the entertainment industry he contrasts the

success of Cirque du Soleil, which does not use animals, with the decline of traditional circuses relying on “dancing elephants or snarling tigers.” The public is now too well informed to enjoy watching exotic animals perform tricks that they would never do if they had not been made to fear their trainers.

Opponents of research on animals have long encouraged the development and use of in vitro testing and computer simulations. These methods are now spreading, largely for economic reasons, enabling the elimination of extremely painful tests like the Draize eye irritation test, which involved placing substances ranging from cosmetics to caustic household cleaners into the eyes of immobilized, unanesthetized rabbits.

T

he most economically significant use we make of animals, however, is for food. Yuval Harari, the author of a brilliant history of our species, has described the treatment of animals in industrial farms as “perhaps the worst crime in history.” That makes intensive animal production the obvious focus of any examination of whether the marketplace can really achieve a humane transformation of our relations with animals, for if it fails there, it is failing to deal with the source of the greatest amount of suffering we inflict on animals.

In both the essay “Animal Liberation” and the subsequent book of the same title I described three extreme forms of confinement then prevalent on intensive farms: crates for veal calves, crates for pregnant sows, and battery cages for laying hens. Across the entire European Union—twenty- eight countries with more than 500 million people—all of these forms of confinement are now illegal. This remarkable achievement came about primarily because of strong public support for animal welfare organizations and European animal coalitions, but science also played a crucial part.

The United Kingdom and Sweden were forerunners. With voters sufficiently concerned about animal welfare to make it an election issue, they banned crates for veal calves and pregnant sows. Having done so, they were keen to prevent a flood of cheaper imports from other European Union member nations with lower animal welfare standards. The European Union is a free-trade area, so that required harmonizing standards within it. The European Commission requested its Scientific Veterinary Committee to report on the welfare requirements of veal calves, sows, and subsequently, laying hens. The expert committee was unequivocal in stating that these requirements were not adequately met in the crates and cages standardly used in industrial farms. The reports recommended far-reaching changes that the European Parliament strongly supported and the European Commission accepted. In the United States, at present all three are prohibited only in California, following a citizen-initiated ballot in 2008, although by 2019 they will also all be outlawed in Michigan.

Why have efforts to protect farm animals in the United States failed to produce the kind of legislative change that Europe has achieved? Do Americans care less about animals? The Californian experience suggests they do not.

When Californian voters were given the opportunity to express their views The New York Review

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on whether it should be permissible to prevent farm animals from turning around or stretching their limbs, they overwhelmingly said no. (This was the year in which Barack Obama was first elected president, and California was one of his strongest states, yet more Californians voted to give freedom of movement to farm animals [63 percent] than voted for Obama [61 percent]).

It is unlikely that the change would have happened in California without the possibility of a citizen-initiated referendum, however, and in the absence of that mechanism, there is no sign of European-style legislation happening federally. It is difficult to escape the inference that US legislatures are less responsive to the views of their constituents than European parliaments, especially when an industry with considerable financial resources at its command is opposing those views.

In the absence of national legislation, how successful has the morally informed US market been in changing the three most extreme forms of confinement? Let’s look at each in turn.

In Animal Liberation I described what was then the industryrecommended way of producing veal: • Separate the calves from their mothers on the day they are born.

• Put them, for the rest of their lives (about sixteen weeks), in crates measuring five feet by two feet (dimensions that, for at least the last month of their lives, prevent them from even turning around).

• Feed them an all-liquid diet until slaughter, even though by then they will have long passed the age at which they would normally eat grass. (This keeps the calves’ flesh pale pink, for which the producer will receive a premium price.)

• Do not provide straw for bedding, because the calves will eat it (see previous point).

• Ensure that the calves do not have access to iron, which will darken their flesh. Check iron levels in your water supply and use a filter if they are high. Construct the crate so that the calves cannot reach any rusty iron fittings, because they will derive iron from licking them.

Veal was the first factory-farming issue to arouse public concern. As Pacelle notes, in the 1980s images of these miserable calves took hold in people’s minds, and American per capita veal consumption dropped from an earlier peak of 8.6 pounds to 0.3 pounds. It still took another two decades of lobbying before the veal industry trade group pledged, in 2007, to get rid of individual veal crates and shift to group housing by 2017. So far, veal consumption has not recovered.

Breeding sows—the mothers of the pigs who are raised for meat—were, and often still are, kept in crates about the same width as those used for veal calves, and just two feet longer. Sows get to be very large animals, so in these crates they cannot walk or turn around.

Left to themselves in a forest, they would spend the day rooting around for edibles, socializing with other sows, or taking care of their piglets. Sows in gestation crates, as they are called, have nothing to do all day but stand up and lie down, except for the brief pe24

riod when they are eating. To relieve the stress, they develop stereotypical behavior, rocking back and forth, or gnawing the bars of their crates. They get out of the crates only to give birth and suckle their piglets. Then they are in a different form of severe confinement known as a “farrowing crate.”

(Pig producers don’t say that their sows are “pregnant” or “give birth”—that would be too much like us. Sows “gestate” and then “farrow.”) As soon as the piglets are taken away, the sows are made pregnant again, usually by artificial insemination. Then they go back into the gestation crates.

Pacelle’s

strategy for changing this practice needed morally informed consumers, but for many years progress was slow. Then in 2011 he received a phone call from Carl Icahn, the tough-minded investor, offering his assistance in the fight against cruelty to animals.

In an inspired move, Pacelle enlisted him in the HSUS’s effort to persuade McDonald’s to stop buying pig meat from producers who use gestation crates.

Attempts to get McDonald’s to adopt stronger animal welfare requirements for the animal products they buy had been going on for a long time.

In 1994 the pioneering animal rights campaigner Henry Spira bought stock in McDonald’s so that he could move a resolution at the company’s annual meeting calling for them to require their suppliers to use the “least restrictive alternative” for housing animals. Some legal wrangling followed and Spira eventually withdrew his resolution in return for a public statement from the company that they would require their suppliers to take “all reasonable steps” to ensure that animals are treated humanely. Spira knew that this could easily be just words on paper, but he accepted the deal on the grounds that “if McDonald’s moves a millimeter, everyone else moves with them.” It was the first time that McDonald’s had accepted responsibility for how its suppliers treated animals.

For the next two years nothing changed for the animals McDonald’s used. Then the corporation made the misguided decision to sue a group of London activists for libel over claims they made in a leaflet. Most of the activists caved in and apologized, but Helen Steel and David Morris decided to represent themselves in court against the corporate giant. That led to the longest libel trial in British legal history, after which the judge found that the statements about McDonald’s responsibility for cruel treatment of animals were not libelous because they were true.

Following the bad publicity McDonald’s received from the trial, Spira renewed his efforts to persuade McDonald’s to make meaningful changes.

In 1997 I was with him when he met with Bob Langert, McDonald’s director of sustainability. Langert agreed that McDonald’s would employ the livestock consultant Temple Grandin to audit the slaughterhouses from which they bought their meat, and to consider any changes she would recommend to improve animal welfare.

We also suggested that McDonald’s require its suppliers to phase out gestation crates for sows, but on that issue

the company procrastinated. After Spira’s death in 1998, other organizations, including the HSUS, took up the campaign. Over the next decade some of McDonald’s major suppliers began to shift away from the crates. McDonald’s, however, continued to resist the pressure to require suppliers to find alternatives to them.

Pacelle knew, as Spira had, that any move by McDonald’s would set a trend for the entire industry, and he also knew that CEOs tend to listen to a billionaire activist investor with a history of buying enough stock to get board seats and then make changes to management. Icahn had done that to make money for himself and his investors.

What was to prevent him doing it to reduce animal suffering?

With Icahn by his side, Pacelle was able to bypass McDonald’s office of sustainability and speak directly to Don Thompson, the CEO. He pointed out that whenever citizen initiatives had managed to put sow crates on the ballot—in initiatives in Florida in 2002, Arizona in 2006, and California in 2008—they had voted to ban them.

McDonald’s executives were surely aware, too, that Chipotle, which years earlier had committed to not buying from producers who confine their pigs, had been experiencing rapid growth.

In February 2012, McDonald’s agreed to phase out the purchase of pig meat from producers using sow crates. Although a spokesperson for the National Pork Producers Council said, “I don’t know who asked the sow if she wanted to turn around,” this was the marketplace at work, not the government, so Washington lobbyists were powerless to block it. During the next three years, more than sixty major brands followed McDonald’s example, including hamburger chains like Burger King and Wendy’s, supermarkets such as Safeway and Kroger, the big-box stores Costco and Target, and, last year, Walmart.

V

eal and sow crates are bad, but battery cages for laying hens are worse still. In Animal Liberation I cited the report of a British government’s expert committee chaired by F.W. Rogers Brambell, an eminent zoologist. The Brambell Report, issued in 1965, recommended that farm animals should have “five freedoms,” namely, the ability to turn around, lie down, stand up, stretch, and groom, without restriction of movement. The 2008 California ballot showed overwhelming support for a similar principle, and it is now incorporated into California law.

In 2013 Joy Mench and Richard Blatchford at the Department of Ani-

mal Science and Center for Animal Welfare, University of California, Davis, carried out research, funded by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, into what this means for hens. They filmed hens and processed the images with software designed to generate the three- dimensional space used for each of the “five freedoms.”

Flapping wings, allowing one inch between the tip of each wing and the edge of the enclosure, required the most space: 297 square inches. Turning around used 204 square inches, and standing took up 87 square inches.

(For comparison, a sheet of American letter-size paper is 93.5 square inches.)

Yet the current guidelines set by United Egg Producers, the egg industry trade organization, permit as little as 67 square inches per hen. Under that degree of crowding, hens cannot flap wings at all, and can turn around only if another hen in the cage is lying down and taking less space. Even standing will result in birds being squeezed against each other or the wire at the edge of the cage.

Hens are in these horrifically crowded conditions for at least a year, until their rate of laying drops off and they are killed.

Moreover, although United Egg Producers boasts that 76 percent of eggs produced in the US come from hens kept in accordance with their guidelines, what about the other 24 percent, which amounts to 70 million hens? Pacelle tells us about Rembrandt, the thirdlargest producer in the US, which had millions of hens in cages that gave them only forty- eight square inches per bird.

Rembrandt wasn’t squeezing its hens in that tight because its owner was a sadist. The squeezing was the outcome of what we could call the inhumane economy. Even if more hens died because of the crowding, and each hen laid fewer eggs than less crowded hens would, that did not outweigh the economic benefits of getting a greater total number of eggs out of the capital invested in the production unit. Hens are cheap, but the sheds, the cages, the machinery to ventilate the sheds and to collect and sort the eggs, and other standing costs are not. If your competitors crowd their hens more than you do, and as a result can sell their eggs at a lower price, you will soon be out of business.

Here’s the good news: Rembrandt is now taking its hens out of cages. So is Rose Acre Farms, the nation’s secondbiggest egg producer. Their CEOs told Pacelle that they wanted to get ahead of the rising tide of consumer concern about animal welfare. Perhaps they want to continue to be able to sell their eggs in California, which has banned the sale of eggs not produced in compliance with the laws that apply to Californian producers. Perhaps they could see that other systems developed in Europe, where the standard cages used in the US have been banned since 2012, could work for them. Perhaps, Pacelle optimistically believes, they had a conscience after all.

F

or hens, as for sows, the biggest breakthrough has come from McDonald’s, which in September 2015 announced that it would begin a ten-year phase- out of eggs from caged hens. McDonald’s uses two billion eggs a year, or The New York Review

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Benjamin Fondane—who was born and educated in Romania, moved as an adult to Paris, lived for a time in Buenos Aires, where he was close to Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges’s friend and publisher, and died in Auschwitz—was an artist and thinker who found in every limit, in every border, “a torture and a spur.â€? Poet, critic, man of the theater, movie director, Fondane was the most daring of the existentialists, a metaphysical anarchist, afďŹ rming the individual against those great abstractions that limit human freedom—the State, History, the Law, the Idea.

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Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500, or visit www.nyrb.com

26

3 percent of all US egg production, so the long phase- out condemns about 70 million hens to spending their lives in cages, but McDonald’s claims that precisely because it is so big a user of eggs, it will take that long for it to ensure adequate supply. In any case, once again, McDonald’s policies have caused other brands to go cage-free—at the time of writing, there have been nearly one hundred announcements since September 2015, including Kroger and Albertson’s, the country’s two largest grocery chains. In April Walmart, the world’s largest retailer and America’s biggest food seller, announced that it too would phase out eggs from caged hens, in all its stores in the United States and in Canada as well.

Taken together, these reforms—the elimination of veal crates, gestation crates for sows, and battery cages for hens—will, when fully implemented, reduce the immense quantity of suffering endured by hundreds of millions of farmed animals in the United States.

The overwhelming majority of calves, pigs, and laying hens will, however, still be kept indoors, in large crowded sheds, and the reforms do nothing to change the ways they are transported or slaughtered. Nor do any of these reforms touch the industrial production of chickens for meat, which John Webster, professor of animal husbandry at the University of Bristol’s School of Veterinary Science and the founder of what is now the world’s largest center for the study of animal welfare and behavior, has described as “in magnitude and severity, the single most severe, systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.�

The problems of chicken production are not simply due to the fact that the birds are raised in vast crowded sheds, in air reeking of ammonia from their accumulated droppings. The more fundamental problem is that today’s chickens have been bred to grow three times as fast as chickens raised in the 1950s. Now they are ready for market when they are just six weeks old and their immature legs cannot handle the weight they gain. As a result, according to Webster, about one third of them are in chronic pain for the last third of their lives.

Given there are eight billion chickens raised for meat in the US every year, that means 2.6 billion birds are experiencing chronic pain for the last two weeks of their lives. Industry reports and scientiďŹ c journals provide evidence that each year 139 million chickens don’t even make it to slaughter. Their legs collapse under them and, unable to move or reach food and water, they die of thirst or they starve.

Or they simply cannot cope with the conditions they are living in, and their hearts give out. Or they die from the stress of being rounded up, thrown into cages, and transported to the slaughterhouses. In one way or another, they suffer to death. The humane economy has yet to have an impact on this huge industry and the unimaginable quantity of suffering it creates.

T

he most fundamental question to ask about Pacelle’s thesis is whether the humane economy can take us beyond piecemeal reforms to a world without speciesism. As long as we continue to eat animals, that seems doubtful, for it is difďŹ cult to respect the interests of

beings we eat, especially when we are under no necessity to eat them. This daily practice taints all our attitudes toward animals. Can the humane economy change that?

Pacelle introduces us to several entrepreneurs who are trying to change it. Plant-based products with the taste and “mouth feel� of meat are already in supermarkets and restaurant chains, offering a product that is not only cruelty-free, but healthier and more environmentally friendly than meat.

Further down the track, if costs can be reduced we may be eating meat that comes from a factory without ever being part of an animal. In 2013 Mark Post, of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, served a group of journalists the world’s ďŹ rst lab-grown hamburger. In a Brooklyn laboratory, Andras Forgacs’s company Modern Meadow uses a different process to achieve the same end. Forgacs visited Pacelle in Washington, D.C., bringing a “steak chip,â€? a kind of lab-grown beef jerky. Pacelle, a vegan for thirty years, had to think hard before deciding to take a bite. He does not enthuse about the taste, but adds that real beef jerky wouldn’t do much for him either.

There is broad support beyond the animal movement for reducing meat consumption. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report Livestock’s Long Shadow acknowledged that livestock, as a result of their digestive process, are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transport sector. One study has even suggested that farmed animals are the most signiďŹ cant drivers of climate change. In any case, with meat- eating on the rise in China and other Asian countries, something will have to give, because it is simply not possible for everyone in the world to eat as much meat as people in the afuent world now eat. That would, according to Vaclav Smil, a leading authority on the environmental limits of food production, require 67 percent more agricultural land than the world possesses. If factory-grown meat does ever replace meat from animals, it will, according to a European Union study, reduce both land use and greenhouse gas emissions from meat production by 99 percent, and water use by 94 percent.

Can the humane economy, driven by morally informed consumers, take this next step, and make food derived from whole animals as obsolete as a horse- drawn buggy is today? A recent report from Chatham House, the London think tank, stresses the difďŹ culty of keeping global warming below 2°C without reducing the consumption of animal products, and then says bluntly: “The market is failing.â€? Only government intervention, the report concludes, can reduce the consumption of animal products, and it recommends switching existing livestock industry subsidies to plant-based alternatives, as well as a carbon tax applied to meat.

European political leaders have gone far in prohibiting cruel methods of raising animals. But it will not be easy to persuade them to adopt such new approaches; it is even harder to see it happening in the US. We can only hope that Pacelle’s humane economy, with assistance from far-sighted philanthropists and venture capitalists, can deliver the alternatives that will beat animal products in the marketplace.

The New York Review

Wonders in the Met’s New Box Ingrid D. Rowland Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Otto Naumann, New York

Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible an exhibition at The Met Breuer, New York City, March 18–September 4, 2016.

Catalog of the exhibition

by Kelly Baum, Andrea Bayer, and Sheena Wagstaff.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 336 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Nasreen Mohamedi: Waiting Is a Part of Intense Living an exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, September 22, 2015–January 11, 2016; and The Met Breuer, New York City, March 18–June 5, 2016.

Catalog of the exhibition

by Roobina Karode, Geeta Kapur, Deepak Ananth, and Andrea Giunta.

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 328 pp., $49.95 (paper) Relation: A Performance Residency by Vijay Iyer at The Met Breuer, New York City, March 18–March 31, 2016 Of all New York’s museums, only the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its vast holdings and long reach, could have opened an exhibition of modern and contemporary art with Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas. Painted nearly half a millennium ago, in 1575, the imposing canvas has lost none of its upsetting power and none of its strangeness. It is a modern work in nearly every useful sense.

Marsyas was a satyr, a homely goatman who played the panpipes so skillfully that he dared to enter a musical contest with the golden god Apollo, who played the lyre with heavenly skill.

Apollo was a handsome god, but mean.

It goes without saying that he won the contest, after which, to punish Marsyas for his boasting, he strung the poor creature up and flayed him alive. Ancient statues show Marsyas hanging from a dead tree, shoulders dislocated but skin still intact, and these images are cruel enough.

Titian, however, compounds the cruelty by hanging him upside down, the better for Apollo and an immortal henchman to carve their way into the satyr’s flesh. True to his mission, the god of music exacts his revenge to an instrumental accompaniment: an Orpheus figure stands beside the tree, singing and playing a Renaissance descendant of the lyre called the viola da braccio as Marsyas bleeds to death.

Just opposite, King Midas, together with another satyr and a little child, bears witness to the horror, while a sweet little dog laps up a startling crimson rivulet of the victim’s blood.

The Flaying of Marsyas was Titian’s last work, executed shortly before his death from plague in 1576, and probably inspired by an intimately Venetian trauma. In August 1571, the Republic of Venice had lost its dominion over Cyprus when the governor, Marcantonio Bragadin, surrendered his garrison to the Bosnian-Ottoman general Lala Kara Mustafa Pasha, over seventy and smarting from his defeat in the brutal May 12, 2016

Anton Raphael Mengs: Portrait of Mariana de Silva y Sarmiento, Duquesa de Huescar, 1775

siege of Malta six years earlier. Rather than negotiating a truce by the usual laws of war, Pasha subjected his prisoner to two weeks of unspeakable tortures, including the flaying that began while Bragadin was still alive but killed him in the process.

Two months later, a combined European navy would defeat the Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto; but for Venice, that landmark victory was no match for the loss of its stronghold in the eastern Mediterranean. The tragedy of Marsyas is thus, in some sense, the tragedy of the Venetian Republic’s impending decline, and old King Midas, who bears silent witness to the scene, is, like Titian himself, an ancient who has lived to see too much.

The Flaying of Marsyas compels attention not only for its grim subject, but also because of the way it is made.

Titian’s handling of paint became progressively looser over time, as he experimented with ever larger, more prominent strokes of his brush, testing how far he could push a sweep of painted pigment into suggesting another form altogether. Eventually the artist began to paint with his fingers, as he almost certainly did with The Flaying of Marsyas, its surface a frenzied mass of smears and daubs laid on thickly over coarse canvas.

The outlines of figures in most of Titian’s late paintings seem to emerge from a mist (or perhaps from a haze of floaters in the old man’s failing eyes), but in The Flaying of Marsyas they are shrouded in something more sin-

ister: a malevolent darkness. Furthermore, as his surfaces became more three- dimensional and more abstract, Titian’s palette also shifted, from the radiant blues, greens, pinks, and golds of his early career to a texture made up of dark browns and grays, illuminated by sporadic flashes of shimmering white, yellow, or, as in this final work, the crimson of flesh and blood and the glinting gold of Midas’s crown.

Marsyas has traveled to New York

from its usual home in the Czech Republic to celebrate the opening of the Metropolitan Museum’s new branch at 75th Street and Madison Avenue, that is, the 1966 stone and concrete structure designed by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton Smith to house the Whitney Museum of American Art. At the same time, a new advertising campaign has christened this new/old venue “The Met Breuer” with a capital “T,” part of an empire now to be known as “The Met” with a capital “T” and so celebrated with a raggedy new logo.

(Was there, as one might imagine, legal scuffling with the Metropolitan Opera in order to drive a distinction between The Met and the Met?) Fortunately, the works of art now on display in this new Met Breuer transcend the limits of the packaging, physical and conceptual, in which the museum has chosen to deliver them.

Breuer’s upside-down pyramid has been spiffed and polished, but its ceilings are still low, its lighting sporadic

and irrational (the greatest number of light fixtures occurring on the ground floor where they are least necessary), its walls as pitiless as a cliff face. With a gigantic seven-story concrete partition dividing the building from its brownstone neighbors and a concrete drawbridge separating it from the sidewalk in front, it remains a hunkered- down fortress of art rather than a temple.

Within a few years of opening, the museum’s 32,000 square feet of exhibition space had already grown limited, and Breuer never thought to provide the structure with an adequate loading dock. Between 1985 and 2003, architects including Michael Graves and Rem Koolhaas drew up expansion plans for the Whitney’s board of trustees, which rejected them all and decided, in the end, to abandon ship entirely and set sail for downtown in a new nautical-themed building designed

by Renzo Piano. The Breuer building, in short, is a white elephant, on which the Metropolitan’s trustees have gambled an eight-year lease rather than a lifetime commitment. Most works of art, like most people, would be happier living somewhere else.

The one exception, perhaps, is the miniature mud village called Dwellings, which Charles Simonds perched on an exposed concrete crossbeam of Breuer’s main stairwell back in 1981.

Dwellings still clings charmingly to its precipice, like a museum diorama escaped from the confinement of a display case. Any label that might have identified the work is long gone, which makes the tiny settlement seem all the more like a renegade outpost, insinuating its own eternal critique of the building’s sterility.

The Breuer building may have its limits, but it can still serve the museum’s stated purpose: broadening the horizons of art in every direction, geographical, temporal, and cultural.

For the inaugural exhibitions, Sheena Wagstaff, formerly of Tate Modern and now chairman of the museum’s new Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, lays out an engaging plan: One of our goals with The Met Breuer is to present thoughtful exhibitions that posit a broader meaning of modernism across vast geographies of art. . . . Great works of art can transcend both time and place, and our program will powerfully demonstrate that potential.

And indeed, there are some wonderful things to see within the old Brutalist box, insightfully placed so that they resonate with one another in ways that go beyond any of the lines suggested by the individual exhibitions or their catalogs. On the ground floor, for example, visiting artist Vijay Iyer provides the musical soundtrack to a film

by Prashant Bhargava that juxtaposes scenes from the Indian festival of Holi, a spring celebration of purification and love in which participants pelt one another with powdered pigment and colored water, and an erotic encounter between a paint-powdered man, barely seen, and a beautiful woman.

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T

he second oor continues the Indian theme, but in a spirit utterly remote from Holi’s orgy of color: it houses a lovely monographic show devoted to the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990), whose meticulous ink drawings and black-and-white photographs create delicate poetry out of horizontal lines, diagonals, and geometric shapes. In Mohamedi’s case, the details of her life afford indispensable clues to the meaning of her art. A secularized Shiite Muslim of part-Arab ancestry, she was born in Karachi but grew up in Bombay (as it was then called). At seventeen, she enrolled in a London art school, and studied in Paris before returning to Mumbai to work with some of India’s ďŹ rst Modernists.

Her lifelong interest in abstraction thus combined immemorial Islamic tradition with inuences from twentieth- century Europe and distinctively Indian ways of life: she drew and painted while sitting cross-legged on a low stool, her work spread at before her. An enthusiastic traveler, she spent a lifetime searching for austerity in life and in what she created.

After a broken engagement broke her heart, she sought out solitude, spoke sparingly, and struggled to strip her art to its essentials.

Early on, she abandoned color for black and white, moving from watercolor to graphite and ink. Throughout her life, she kept a series of diaries on lined paper, blacking out entries that no longer pleased her with geometric precision. Many of these pages are on display, with her own notes in English and Urdu. Her thoughts often sound like haiku: The full moon A perfect circle Complete serenity

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and Holi as an intimate experience, but above all we have Holi as an expression of art itself, an upwelling of color, energy, passion, affection. Yet like every ecstatic experience, Holi is fraught with danger.

Loving caresses mar the woman’s face with sweat and smears of indigo—are these acts of love or violation? At the same time, the hordes of color-drenched revelers, like Iyer’s music, grow more and more frenzied, more and more violent in their paint-pelting, until exultation verges into menace, just as the musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas once slipped in its own way from melody into perversity.

Photograph by Nasreen Mohamedi, 1967

Over time, we see how exquisite drawings of nature turn into abstract compositions of misty shapes and lines, some languid, some sharp. By the late 1950s, her hands had begun to tremble, the ďŹ rst sign that she had inherited the same Huntington’s disease that had already killed her father and brothers.

To control the effects of progressive nerve damage, she began drawing with a Rotring pen and precision tools like a T-square, compass, and straightedge, ďŹ rst covering sheets of paper with intricate rows of lines and then reducing her lines and diagonal planes to the barest presence on the paper’s blank surface, braving terrible pain to do so. She took photographs with a series of sophisticated Nikon cameras—she loved ďŹ ne machinery—and these images show her same reďŹ ned ability to discern an essential geometry in nature and in the works of human hands. She is a sublime artist who merits the attention she has been given on this occasion. The ex-

hibition itself is a collaboration among the Reina SofĂ­a Museum in Madrid, the Metropolitan, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi.

T

he most ambitious of the museum’s inaugural exhibitions occupies its top two gallery oors. Under the rubric “UnďŹ nished: Thoughts Left Visible,â€? this monumental show gathers together works from the ďŹ fteenth century to the present, reserving the upper oor (the one with the big picture window that looms on the building’s façade like the eye of a robotic Cyclops) for the more recent objects. Some of these pieces are indeed unďŹ nished, but just as many are not. Some are sketches.

Some are reworked. Some, like Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas and Rodin’s Hand of God, are completed works that display rough or unusual techniques. The idea of incompletion is more a convenient catch-all for bringing together a wide variety of objects than a coherent guiding principle.

This confusion about the nature of completion and its lack extends to the physical form of the exhibition catalog, which is bound in gray cardboard just as the Breuer building is bound in unadorned gray concrete. In both of these cases, however, the stripped-down grayness is a ďŹ nished product, a fully developed conceit. There is nothing unďŹ nished about either one. The catalog’s essays are equally rootless, wandering beyond art to take in literature and ďŹ lm, mostly in the kind of language that is demanded of graduate students in art history but has scant purchase with a larger public.

Here is an opportunity to communicate with the world across Marcel Breuer’s drawbridge, but the discussion is basically addressed to a relatively restricted circle of adepts. As tiny a word as “theâ€? becomes obtrusive, between a director’s introduction that keeps invoking The Met in all its majuscule splendor, and locutions like “the unďŹ nishedâ€? or its Italian cousin “the non ďŹ nitoâ€? that sound inated because they are. “UnďŹ nished,â€? show and catalog, The Met and The Met Breuer are all simply trying too hard to be special, focusing on themselves rather than the art.

(Nasreen Mohamedi, forging ahead on her own eccentric trajectory, provides a bracing contrast.) The art, on the other hand, at least much of it, is a marvel.

A selection as consciously eclectic as the Metropolitan Museum of Art

ThE NaTiOnAl EnDoWmEnT FoR ThE HuMaNiTiEs PrEsEnTs

Rembrandt: The Great Jewish Bride, 1635

The New York Review

gathering assembled for “Unfinished” must have its highs and lows, but the highs are celestial, beginning with that Flaying of Marsyas, hanging on a wall between Titian’s Agony in the Garden (1558–1562), with its pinpoints of flame and glinted reflections piercing the darkness of Christ’s despair, and Jacopo Bassano’s radiant Baptism of Christ (circa 1590), where the light that bathes Jesus and the Baptist like holy water is the light of pure divinity. What could be better than drawings by Michelangelo and Leonardo next to unfinished paintings by Jan van Eyck and Albrecht Dürer that reveal their underdrawing, all ranged alongside one another in one exquisite row (and having the expert Carmen Bambach to explain them in the catalog)?

When will there be another opportunity to experience two of the greatest oil colorists of all time, Federico Barocci and El Greco, in a single glance? El Greco’s cosmic vision certainly suffers from confinement beneath a low ceiling raked by artificial spotlights. They take the edge off his incomparable greens and shoot a glare off the painting’s glazed surface. The whitewashed, sunsoaked wall of a soaring Toledo chapel without spotlights would be better from every conceivable standpoint—but who cares? His Vision of Saint John (circa 1608–1614) is still a glory under Breuer’s boxy, repetitive ceiling coffers.

Pier Francesco Mola’s Portrait of Alexander VII Chigi (circa 1659) is finished within its own terms: it is a probable presentation sketch for a larger portrait, composed of ribbonlike slashes in crimson and flesh tones.

With its blazing color and shimmering brushwork, it sets out deliberately, even at the sketching stage, to challenge the masterful portrait that Velázquez made of Pope Alexander’s mentor, Pope Innocent X (in Rome’s Doria Pamphilj Gallery). Mola’s work rises beautifully to that lofty challenge, with its ravishing technique and its penetrating inquiry into the soul of a pope who was renowned as a scholar, lawyer, and diplomat, and was elected, in fact, by unanimous vote of his peers.

But the pope, born Fabio Chigi, was held at his baptism by a painter, Francesco Vanni, and he remained an artist at heart, as well as one of the very greatest patrons of art and architecture in Baroque Rome. When Alexander went drawing with Gianlorenzo Bernini in the Vatican gardens, they both put pen to paper on the very same page of their shared sketchbook (which still exists in the Vatican Library). In the current exhibition, Mola’s painting hangs in one of the rooms that receives natural light from Breuer’s random trapezoidal windows, so its colors are true. It deserves to be savored at length, but there is no place to sit down and do so.

Portraiture is a genre for which the

guiding theme of “Unfinished” works rather well, fortified by an excellent catalog essay, “Portraiture and the Question of Focus,” by Andrea Bayer and Nicholas Cullinan. From Titian’s all-too-insightful portrait of his friend Pietro Aretino (1545) to Kerry James Marshall’s majestic allegory Untitled (2009), the range of human likenesses presented here is as broad as the range of reasons for their incomplete state. Weirdest of all is a painting of the Spanish artist Mariana de Silva y

May 12, 2016

Sarmiento, Duquesa de Huescar, by the eighteenth-century Neoclassicist Anton Raphael Mengs, complete in every detail except the face and the figure of a lap dog, both of which have been scraped away for reasons unknown (see illustration on page 27).

Usually the situation is reversed, with cursory body and detailed head, an effective means, as Bayer and Cullinan note, to concentrate the viewer’s attention on a sitter’s face. Pietro Aretino complained that Titian gave him a slapdash body because a more careful likeness would have inflated the cost of the portrait, but in fact the slashes of pink paint angling down Aretino’s red velvet robe have a slimming effect on his monumental belly—and from a distance they do not look unfinished at all, but rather mimic the glint of bright light on crimson satin.

Several painters opt for a sketched-in body and a detailed face, among them the portrait of his teacher Michelangelo

by Daniele da Volterra (circa 1544), Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Young Black (circa 1770; the National Portrait Gallery in London identifies him as Dr. Johnson’s manservant Francis Barber), George Romney’s painting of himself (1784), and Édouard Manet’s portrait of his wife, Suzanne (circa 1873). Daniele da Volterra also devotes careful attention to Michelangelo’s left hand, closed around the chisel it plied with such incomparable skill.

The “unfinished” category works well for Rembrandt’s prints and engravings, discussed in Nadine Orenstein’s helpful catalog essay. By its very nature, printing took place in several stages, although Rembrandt was willing, for money, to sign earlier states of his engravings and sell them as finished works. He created contrasts between dark and light by leaving areas of blank paper, a technique exploited to similar effect by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the eighteenth century and Nasreen Mohamedi in the twentieth, but he also signed off on evidently incomplete works like his Great Jewish Bride (1635), which occupies only the upper part of the paper on which it is printed (see illustration on page 28). “Unfinished” also describes the work of Impressionists like Cézanne, eternally dissatisfied with what he produced.

Sometimes, however, the category is so broad as to be frustrating. By the sheer volcanic energy of their urge to create, J. M.W. Turner and Pablo Picasso defied the idea that any work of art could ever be fully resolved, let alone an artist’s career; they are represented in this exhibition, as they must be, by multiple works to capture several of the facets of their lifelong quest.

But these two driven men went about their artistic experiments in different ways, for different reasons, perhaps for different ends. “Unfinished” is too indefinite and too small a category to contain them both in any illuminating way. A roomful of Turners, moreover, commemorates an enterprise radically different in its bitter struggle from something like the series of six black, white, and green drip panels that Cy Twombly painted from the safety of his wealth and privilege.

T

he upper floor is largely, though not entirely, devoted to more recent works.

Compared with Rodin’s luminous marble Hand of God (circa 1907), tingling

with the new life still enclosed within its fingers, the circle of obscenely gesturing cast-bronze hands that makes up Bruce Nauman’s Untitled (Hand Circle) (1996) looks like so much dead meat; not every comparison between works of art ends in a draw. On the other hand, two white-ground paintings by South African Marlene Dumas and Austrian Maria Lassnig show surprising affinities to one another in their bold brushwork, penetrating color, and nude female subject, although in The Painter (1994) Dumas depicts a little girl with her hands dipped in paint, whereas Lassnig’s self-portrait You or Me (2005) shows an elderly woman with a gun in each hand, one aimed at her own temple and one at the viewer. With their depictions of human life at two different stages of its cycle, this pair of canvases also provides a challenging counterpoint to the emergent man and woman still cradled in the sculpted hand of Rodin’s Creator, and all three works, each in its own way, refer back insistently to the creative force that brought them into being: the hand of the artist.

Several of the later rooms, the ones devoted to installations by such artists as Robert Smithson and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, are supplied with long titles punctuated by colons, another academic peculiarity that has seeped over into the curatorial slant of this exhibition, with rubrics like “Assistance Needed: The Role of the Viewer.” And of course everything, everywhere, is “iconic,” which word, like “like,” should be banned for at least a decade from the English language. “Unfinished” is one way to look at the pile of hard candy Gonzalez-

Torres has heaped in the corner of a room (1991), but “entropy” would work just as well, and “plate of spaghetti” is probably even more to the point (like snowflakes, no two strands are exactly alike, but we know them just the same).

Nor does “Unfinished” quite cover what is happening with the delicate inked-in squares of Reticulárea Cuadrada (1971–1976) by Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt—“Gego”—or the busy, repetitive calligraphy of Hanne Darboven’s Four Sheets (1974), ink drawings on paper, or Vija Celmins’s meticulous engraving Drypoint—Ocean Surface (1985). Taken together, these black-and-white works raise interesting questions in connection with Nasreen Mohamedi, not so much about finishing or the lack of it, but about how women artists have managed to navigate their way through the sharkinfested waters of contemporary art.

Five centuries separate these small, intricate pieces from the grand sweep of Titian’s brush and fingers, and perhaps there is no real way to bind the two extremes together, but they do tell a continuous story of human striving, intelligence, and—if one may utter a forbidden word—beauty. They can be appreciated on their own terms, and their own terms may be enough.

White elephants were the king of Siam’s gift to courtiers he wanted to ruin, because taking proper care of them was so expensive. But for those who had the means, white elephants provided the ultimate proof of majesty.

Marcel Breuer’s white elephant now does its tenant great honor, and has every potential to continue doing so in the future.

Christopher Wool 8QWLWOHG, 2013, Lithograph in 2 colors on J. Whatman handmade paper, 30 1/2 x 22 1/2”, Edition 48 Published by Universal Limited Art Editions © Christopher Wool/ Universal Limited Art Editions info@hirambutler.com

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Neuroscience and the Law: Don’t Rush In As you sit reading this, you probably experience an internal voice, unheard by any outsider, that verbally repeats the words you see on the page. That voice (which, in your case, speaks perfect English) is part of what we call your conscious mind.

And the physical organ that causes what you see on the page to be simultaneously voiced internally is what we call your brain. The scientific study of how the brain relates to the mind is what we call cognitive neuroscience.

The brain is an incredibly complex organ, and for most of modern history it has defied serious scientific study.

But the development in the past few decades of various technologies, collectively called “brain scans,” that enable us to trace certain operations of the brain have considerably increased our knowledge of how its activities correlate with various mental states.

The law, for its part, is deeply concerned with mental states, particularly intentions. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously put it, “Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.” Distinctions of intent frequently determine, as a matter of law, the difference between going to prison and going free. Cognitive neuroscience thus holds out the promise of helping us to perceive, decide, and explain how intentions are arrived at and carried out. In theory, therefore, cognitive neuroscience could have a huge impact on the development and refinement of the law.

But there is reason to pause. Cognitive neuroscience is still in its infancy, and much of what has so far emerged that might be relevant to the law consists largely of hypotheses that are far from certainties. The natural impulse of forward-thinking people to employ the wonders of neuroscience in making the law more “modern” and “scientific” needs to be tempered with a healthy skepticism, or some dire results are likely. Indeed, the history of using “brain science” to alter the law is not a pretty picture. A few examples will illustrate the point.

I

n the early twentieth century, a leading “science” was eugenics, which put forward, among other ideas, a genetic theory about the brain, and also had philosophical components akin to Social Darwinism (and coincidentally, was first developed by Darwin’s halfcousin, Francis Galton).

Eugenics claimed to be based on scientific principles that “proved” that certain deleterious mental states, most notably “feeblemindedness,” were sufficiently directly inheritable that they could be greatly reduced in number by prohibiting the carriers of the defective genes from procreating. Not only would this be advantageous to society as a whole, it would also virtually eliminate the misery that would be the lot of any child born feebleminded, since very few would be born.

So convincing was this argument, and so attractive its “scientific” basis, that eugenics quickly won the support of a great many enlightened people, such as Alexander Graham Bell, Winston Churchill, W. E. B. Du Bois, Havelock 30

Princeton Architectural Press

Jed S. Rakoff percentage were rendered, in effect, human vegetables, with a limited emotional life and decreased cognition. But many of these negative results were kept secret. For example, it was not until John F. Kennedy ran for president that it became widely known that his sister Rosemary had become severely mentally incapacitated as a result of the lobotomy performed on her in 1941, when she was twenty-three years old.

Still, by the early 1960s, enough of the bad news had seeped out that lobotomies began to be subject to public scrutiny and legal limitations. Eventually, most nations banned lobotomies altogether; but they are still legal in the US in limited circumstances.

While US law in the mid-twentieth

‘Deer, Boy’; drawing by James Edward Deeds Jr. from an album of nearly three hundred drawings that he made during his thirty-seven years as an inmate at a psychiatric hospital in Nevada, Missouri, starting in 1936. The drawings are collected in The Electric Pencil: Drawings from Inside State Hospital No. 3, with an introduction by Richard Goodman and a foreword by Harris Diamant, just published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Ellis, Herbert Hoover, John Maynard Keynes, Linus Pauling, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and George Bernard Shaw. Many of the major universities in the US included a eugenics course in their curriculum.

This widespread acceptance of eugenics also prepared the way for the enactment of state laws that permitted the forced sterilization of women thought to be carriers of “feeblemindedness.”

At first such laws were controversial, but in 1927 they were held constitutional by a nearly unanimous Supreme Court in the infamous case of Buck v.

Bell. Writing for the eight justices in the majority (including such notables as Louis D. Brandeis, Harlan F. Stone, and William Howard Taft), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. found, in effect, that the Virginia state legislature was justified in concluding (based on eugenics) that imbecility was directly heritable, and that the findings of the court in the case showed that not just Carrie Buck but also her mother and illegitimate child were imbecilic. It was therefore entirely lawful to sterilize Buck against her will, because, in Holmes’s words, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

In the first half of the twentieth century, more than 50,000 Americans were sterilized on the basis of eugenicsbased laws. It was not until Adolf Hitler became a prominent advocate of eugenics, praising it in Mein Kampf and repeatedly invoking it as a justification for his extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and gays, that the doubtful science behind eugenics began to be subjected to widespread criticism.

Yet

even as eugenics began to be discredited in the 1940s, a new kind of “brain science” began to gain legal acceptance, namely, lobotomies. A lobotomy is a surgical procedure that cuts the connections between the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain most associated with cognition) and the rest of the brain (including the parts more associated with emotions). From the outset of its development in the 1930s, it was heralded as a way to rid patients of chronic obsessions, delusions, and other serious mental problems. It was generally regarded, moreover, as the product of serious science, to the point that its originator, the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949 in recognition of its development.

Indeed, lobotomy science was so widely accepted that in the United States alone at least 40,000 lobotomies were performed between 1940 and 1965. While most of these were not court-ordered, the law, accepting lobotomies as sound science, required only the most minimal consent on the part of the patient; often, indeed, the patient was a juvenile and the consent was provided by the patient’s parents.

Lobotomies were also performed on homosexuals, who, in what was the official position of the American psychiatric community until 1973, suffered from a serious mental disorder by virtue of their sexual orientation.

Nonetheless, some drawbacks to lobotomies were, or should have been, evident from the outset. About 5 percent of those who underwent the operation died as a result. A much larger

century tolerated lobotomies, it positively embraced psychiatry in general and Freudian psychoanalysis in particular. This was hardly surprising, since, according to Professor Jeffrey Lieberman, former president of the American Psychiatric Association, “by 1960, almost every major psychiatry position in the country was occupied by a psychoanalyst” and, in turn, “the psychoanalytic movement had assumed the trappings of a religion.” In the judicial establishment, the original high priest of this religion was the brilliant and highly influential federal appellate judge David L. Bazelon.

Having himself undergone psychotherapy, Judge Bazelon, for the better part of the 1950s and 1960s, sought to introduce Freudian concepts and reasoning into the law. For example, in his 1963 opinion in a robbery case called Miller v. United States, Judge Bazelon, quoting from Freud’s article “Psychoanalysis and the Ascertaining of Truth in Courts of Law,” suggested that judges and juries should not infer a defendant’s consciousness of guilt from the fact that the defendant, confronted by a victim with evidence that he had stolen a wallet, tried to flee the scene.

Rather, said Bazelon, “Sigmund Freud [has] warned the legal profession [that] ‘you may be led astray . . . by a neurotic who reacts as though he were guilty even though he is innocent.’” If Freud said it, it must be right.

Eventually, much of the analysis Judge Bazelon used to introduce Freudian notions into the law proved both unworkable as law and unprovable as science, and some of his most important rulings based on such analysis were eventually discarded, sometimes with his own concurrence. Ultimately, Judge Bazelon himself became disenchanted with psychoanalysis. In a 1974 address to the American Psychiatric Association, he denounced certain forms of psychiatric testimony as “wizardry” and added that “in no case is it more difficult to elicit productive and reliable expert testimony than in cases that call on the knowledge and practice of psychiatry.” But this change of attitude of Judge Bazelon, and others, came too late to be of much use to the hundreds of persons who had been declared incompetent, civilly committed to asylums, or otherwise deprived of their rights on the basis of what Judge Bazelon subsequently denounced as The New York Review

It is only fair to note that, just as the

law has often been too quick to accept, and too slow to abandon, the “accepted” brain science of the moment, it is equally the case that the law has sometimes asked of brain scientists more than they are equipped to deliver. Consider, for example, the process of civil commitment, by which persons with serious mental disorders are involuntarily confined to psychiatric wards, mental facilities, insane asylums, and the like. Although these facilities (many of which have now been shut down) are in some respects like prisons, especially since the “patients” are not free to leave the premises and must follow the orders of their keepers, commitment to these facilities differs from commitment to prison in that the committed individuals are confined for an “indefinite period” (sometimes forever) until their treatment is sufficiently successful as to warrant their release. Moreover, the commitment comes about not by their being criminally convicted by a jury on proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but rather by a judge making a determination—almost exclusively on the basis of psychiatric testimony—that it is more likely than not that they meet the civil standard for commitment.

What is that standard? In most American jurisdictions prior to 1960,

*See Frederick Crews, “The Revenge of the Repressed,” The New York Review, November 17, 1994, and December 1, 1994.

May 12, 2016

the standard was that the individual was “in serious need of [mental] treatment.” This standard had the virtue of being one that was acceptable to most psychiatrists, for a large part of their everyday practice was determining who needed mental treatment and of what kind. But the standard suffered from a vagueness and concomitant arbitrariness that troubled courts and legislators. Accordingly, beginning in the mid-1960s it was replaced, in nearly all jurisdictions, by the current standard: that a particular person, by reason of mental problems, “is a danger to himself or others.”

What this means, in practice, is that the psychiatrist testifying at a civil commitment hearing must make a prediction about whether the person is likely to engage in violence. But if there Nelly Alia-Klein et al., “Brain Monoamine Oxidase A Activity Predicts Trait Aggression,” Journal of Neuroscience, May 7, 2008

“conclusory statements couched in psychiatric terminology” (a form of testimony that persists to this day in many court proceedings).

A final example of how the law was misled by what previously passed for good brain science must be mentioned, since it was the subject of controversy in these very pages. Beginning in the 1980s, a growing number of prominent psychotherapists advocated suggestive techniques to help their patients “recover” supposedly repressed memories of past traumas, such as childhood incestuous rapes. Eventually, in the early 1990s, more than a hundred people were prosecuted in the United States for sexual abuse based on such retrieved memories, and even though in most of these cases there was little or no other evidence, more than a quarter of the accused were convicted.

But also beginning in the early 1990s, careful studies undertaken by memory experts, most prominently Professor Elizabeth Loftus, showed that many of the techniques used in helping people to recover repressed memories had the ability to implant false memories in them, thus casting doubt on the entire enterprise. In reviewing Professor Loftus’s work in these pages in 1994, Frederick Crews argued that the reason the recovered memory approach had gained such acceptance despite its limited scientific legitimacy was that it was politically correct.* His analysis provoked some irate letters in response.

In the end, however, the work of Loftus and other serious scientists was so convincing that it prevailed. But while many of those convicted on the basis of recovered memory evidence were then released, others were not, and some may still be in prison.

Brain activity in ‘aggressive and nonaggressive participants’; from a 2008 study of trait aggression as a predictor of future violence, published in The Journal of Neuroscience

is one thing psychiatrists are not very good at, it is predicting future violence.

Indeed, in an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court in 1980, the American Psychiatric Association reported that its members were frequently no better than laypeople in predicting future violence. The “future danger” test, it argued, was therefore not a very useful one.

Yet it remains the test, and the law thus forces psychiatrists called to testify at a civil commitment hearing to make the very prediction they have difficulty making.

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he foregoing illustrates that brain science and the law have not easily meshed in the past, suggesting that future interactions should be approached with caution. Which brings us to the interplay of law and cognitive neuroscience. As noted at the outset of this article, cognitive neuroscience has made considerable advances in recent years; and given the law’s focus on matters of the mind, it is hardly surprising that many commentators have suggested that neuroscience has much to offer the law.

Judges themselves have expressed similar interests. For example, a few years ago, in connection with preparing, along with Professor Michael S. Gazzaniga (the “father” of modern cognitive neuroscience) and various other contributors, A Judge’s Guide to Neuroscience, I did an informal survey of federal judges and found that they had a host of questions about the possible impact of neuroscience on the

law, ranging from “What is an f MRI?” to “Does neuroscience give us new insights into criminal responsibility?” and much in between. But when we consider the actual impact of modern neuroscience on the law thus far, the record is mixed.

Most attempts to apply new advances in neuroscience to individual cases either have been rejected by the courts or have proven of little value. Consider, for example, the so-called “neuroscientific lie detector.” While a “scientific” way to determine if a witness is lying or telling the truth would seemingly be of great value to the legal system, the existing lie-detecting machine, the polygraph—which presupposes that telling an intentional lie is accompanied by increased sweating, a rising pulse rate, and the like—has proven notoriously unreliable and is banned from almost all courts. But relying on the not unreasonable hypothesis that devising an intentional lie involves different mental activities than simply telling the truth, some neuroscientists have hypothesized that certain brain movements correlated with lying might be detected.

Some early studies seemed promising. While undergoing brain scans, subjects were asked to randomly lie in response to simple questions (for example, “Is the card you are looking at the ace of spades?”), and the brain activity when they lied was greater than, and different from, the brain activity when they told the truth. But there were problems with these studies, both technical and theoretical. For example, while the subjects were supposed to remain perfectly still in the brain scanner, even very small (and not easily detected) physical movements led to increased brain activity appearing on the scans, thus confounding the results.

More significantly, these studies did nothing to resolve the question of whether the increased brain activity was the result of lying or was the result of what the subjects were actually doing cognitively, i.e., following orders to randomly make up lies. In these and numerous other ways, the studies were far removed from what might be involved in a court witness’s lying.

Nevertheless, on the basis of the early studies, two companies were formed to market “neuroscientific lie detection” to the public, and one of them tried to introduce its evidence in court in two cases. In one case, in New York state court, the evidence was held inadmissible on the ground that it “infringed” the right of the jury to determine credibility. This rationale is not very convincing. Jurors have no special competence to determine the truth: they do it in the same imperfect way that everyday citizens do in everyday life. So if there were truly a well-tested, highly reliable instrument for helping them determine the truth, its results would be as welcome as, say, DNA evidence is today in assisting juries to decide guilt or innocence.

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owever, in the second case, US v.

Semrau, in federal court in Tennessee, the evidence was also held inadmissible, but this time on much more convincing grounds. The case involved a psychologist who owned two businesses that provided government-reimbursed psychological services to nursing home patients, and the charge was that he

had manipulated the billing codes so as to overcharge the government by $3 million. His defense was that the mistakes in coding were unintentional. In that regard, defense counsel sought to introduce testimony from the neuroscientist founder of one of the companies marketing neuroscientific lie detection, to the effect that he had placed the defendant in a brain scanner and asked him questions of the form “Did you intend to cheat the government when you coded and billed these services?”

According to the expert, the brain scan evidence showed that the defendant was being honest when he answered such questions “No.” The expert conceded that during one of the three sessions when these questions had been put to the defendant, the brain scan results were consistent with lying; but the expert contended that this was the result of the defendant’s being “fatigued” in ways he was not at the other two sessions. The judge found, however, that this supposed “anomaly” was actually indicative of the doubts already expressed in the scientific literature about the validity and reliability of neuroscientific lie detection. Accordingly, he excluded the evidence as unreliable.

As this example suggests, cognitive neuroscience, despite the considerable publicity it has received, is still not able to produce well-tested, reliable procedures for detecting and measuring specific mental states in specific individuals.

If the legal system were to embrace such evidence before it was far better developed than it is at present, the same kinds of dire “mistakes” that occurred in the situations involving eugenics, lobotomies, psychoanalysis, and recovered memories might well again occur.

This is not to say, however, that the considerable advances in neuroscience over the past few decades are without any relevance to the legal system. Even if it is not yet ready to resolve individual cases, some of its more general conclusions may be helpful in making broad policy decisions of consequence to the legal system. Consider, for example, the common observation that adolescents have less control over impulses than adults. Neuroscience helps explain why this occurs. To put it simply, at puberty several parts of the brain rapidly enlarge. This includes the parts associated with impulsive activity and, a bit later, the parts associated with control over impulses. But the connections between these parts only slowly improve (through “mylineation”) to the point where the communication between the enlarged areas can be sufficiently swift to hold in check new impulsive urges of adolescents. On average, this takes more than a year, and the Supreme Court has cited studies of this kind in reaching its conclusions that the death penalty and life imprisonment are unconstitutional when imposed on those below the age of eighteen.

On the other hand, neuroscience is not yet close to developing a test for determining the precise degree to which impulse control has developed in any given adolescent—so that, for example, a prosecutor could not fairly rely on neuroscience to determine whether any particular adolescent should be prosecuted as an adult or as a juvenile.

Again, the point is that neuroscience is at a stage where it may be able to provide helpful insights to the general development of the law, but not much, if 31

anything, in the way of evidence about individuals in particular cases.

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till, neuroscience may be helpful to the development of legal policy in dealing with the problem of drug addiction—a problem that consumes much of both state and federal criminal systems. The United States spends billions of dollars each year both punishing and treating drug addicts, but the success rate of even the most sophisticated treatment programs, as measured by the former addicts who do not resume drug use over the period of the program, is rarely better than 50 percent, and considerably lower if measured by relapses after the program is over.

Why is this so, since most addicts want to quit? A considerable amount of neuroscientific research over the past few decades has been addressed to this problem, and while much of the

research remains controversial or simply inconclusive, at least some of the results are now generally accepted in the neuroscientific community. These include, for example, the finding that drug addiction actually alters the way the synapses in certain areas of the brain operate (so that an addict has to have his drug just to feel “normal”) and also the finding that the cravings associated with drug addiction will over time come to be generated by secondary cues (ranging from the sight of a needle to a return to a party scene).

These findings suggest, first, that simply getting an addict drug-free and over the symptoms of withdrawal is unlikely to be sufficient to prevent readdiction in many cases; and second, that only very long-term programs, including drug testing over many years and training and retraining addicts to avoid the cues that will trigger a re-

lapse, are likely to be truly effective.

(A different approach, in the form of a vaccine, is also possible, but insufficiently well developed to be considered here.)

Such programs would be very expensive, though probably not as expensive as the combined cost of incarceration and short-term treatment programs now imposed on some drug-addicted individuals again and again. Nor would such programs work in every case, for once again, the neuroscience says more about the population as a whole than any given individual. But if nothing else, the neuroscience about the subject does seem to indicate not just that the present approaches are unlikely to be successful overall, but also why this is so.

Here, as in the case of adolescent impulse-control, the neuroscience has already had some modest impact on the courts. Indeed, as early as 1962,

the Supreme Court, in deciding that it was unconstitutional to criminalize the status of being a drug addict, expressly adopted the position that addiction was an “illness” rather than a form of criminal misconduct (although this decision meant little when, a decade later, most states made even mere drug possession a serious felony). But the neuroscience has also been used to support the creation of drug courts, the success record and fairness of which remain controversial.

Neuroscience is mind-boggling. It is developing at a rapid pace, and may have more to offer the legal system in the future. For now, however, the lessons of the past suggest that, while neuroscientific advances may be a useful aid in evaluating broad policy initiatives, a too-quick acceptance by the legal system of the latest neuroscientific “discoveries” may be fraught with danger.

The Trump Bomb Jeremy Bernstein I recently offered to tutor Donald Trump on nuclear matters. To put things clearly, I went on his website and in the place where you could send comments, I began mine by saying that on these things he did not seem to know his ass from a wheel. I felt that as a person who seems to like straight talk he might appreciate my candor. I then went on to say that while I was not a supporter I would, as a physicist, be willing to tutor him so he would have a clearer understanding of the issue. I have not heard back and the interviews he gave on March 26 to two New York Times reporters—the transcript is available online—show that my services are badly needed.* One of the reporters was David E. Sanger, who is a very great expert on these matters. He showed in the transcript and a subsequent report an almost Buddhic self-restraint. I wish I had been present when he hung up the phone. The other reporter was Maggie Haberman, formerly of Politico. She began:

strong military and tremendous capability in so many ways. We’re not anymore. We have a military that’s severely depleted. We have nuclear arsenals which are in very terrible shape. They don’t even know if they work. We’re not the same country, Maggie and David, I mean, I think you would both agree.

Donald Trump

It is not clear to me exactly what Maggie and David are being asked to agree to. Is it the notion that having nuclear weapons in Japan and South Korea would help alleviate proliferation—his “biggest problem”—or is it that our nuclear arsenals are in “very terrible shape? They don’t even know if they work”? Who gave him this absurd idea? Who is the “they”? Unfortunately these questions were not asked, but Sanger bravely soldiered on: So, just to follow Maggie’s thought there, though, the Japanese view has always been, if the United States, at any point, felt as if it was uncomfortable defending them, there has always been a segment of Japanese society, and of Korean society that said, “Well, maybe we should have our own nuclear deterrent, because if the US isn’t certain, we need to make sure the North Koreans know that.” Is that a reasonable position? Do you think at some point they should have their own arsenal?

I wanted to ask you about some things that you said in Washington on Monday, more recently. But you’ve talked about them a bunch.

So, you have said on several occasions that you want Japan and South Korea to pay more for their own defense. You’ve been saying versions of that about Japan for thirty years. Would you object if they got their own nuclear arsenal, given the threat that they face from North Korea and China?

Trump: Well, you know, at some point, there is going to be a point at *For the full transcript, see “Transcript: Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign Policy Views,” The New York Times, March 26, 2016. See also David E. Sanger and Maggie Haberman, “In Donald Trump’s Worldview, America Comes First, and Everybody Else Pays,” The New York Times, March 26, 2016.

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Trump replies:

which we just can’t do this anymore. And, I know the upsides and the downsides. But right now we’re protecting, we’re basically protecting Japan, and we are, every time North Korea raises its head, you know, we get calls from Japan and we get calls from everybody else, and “Do something.” And there’ll be a point at which we’re just not

going to be able to do it anymore.

Now, does that mean nuclear? It could mean nuclear. It’s a very scary nuclear world. Biggest problem, to me, in the world, is nuclear, and proliferation. At the same time, you know, we’re a country that doesn’t have money. . . .

We’re not a rich country. We were a rich country with a very

Well, it’s a position that we have to talk about, and it’s a position that at some point is something that we have to talk about, and if the United States keeps on its path, its current path of weakness, they’re going to want to have that anyway with or without me discussing it, because I don’t think they feel very secure in what’s going on with our country, David. You know, if you The New York Review

look at how we backed our enemies, it hasn’t—how we backed our allies—it hasn’t exactly been strong. When you look at various places throughout the world, it hasn’t been very strong. And I just don’t think we’re viewed the same way that we were twenty or twenty-five years ago, or thirty years ago. And, you know, I think it’s a problem. You know, something like that, unless we get very strong, very powerful and very rich, quickly, I’m sure those things are being discussed over there anyway without our discussion.

short we should encourage the Japanese to have nuclear weapons so that they can come to our defense. Exactly how this fits in with the notion that nuclear proliferation is the biggest problem is not made clear. Maybe there is good proliferation and bad proliferation. (Trump later said that it would be “terrible” if the countries he mentioned fought with nuclear weapons.)

Haberman takes up the line of questioning:

buying planes, they’re buying everything, they’re buying from everybody but the United States. I would never have made the deal.”

To which Sanger responds, “Our law prevents us from selling to them, sir.”

Trump replies, “Uh, excuse me?”

Sanger answers, “Our law prevents us from selling any planes or, we still have sanctions in the US which would prevent the US from being able to sell that equipment.”

Trump responds:

Would you, you were just talking about the nuclear world we live in, and you’ve said many times, and I’ve heard you say it throughout the campaign, that you want the US to be more unpredictable.

Bao Dandan/Xinhua/Eyevine/Redux

Sanger makes a valiant attempt to get Trump to deal with the question

In

Donald Trump at a rally against the nuclear deal with Iran, Washington, D.C., September 2015

being asked: “And would you have an objection to it?” To which Trump responds: Um, at some point, we cannot be the policeman of the world. And unfortunately, we have a nuclear world now. And you have, Pakistan has them. You have, probably, North Korea has them. I mean, they don’t have delivery yet, but you know, probably, I mean to me, that’s a big problem. And, would I rather have North Korea have them with Japan sitting there having them also? You may very well be better off if that’s the case. In other words, where Japan is defending itself against North Korea, which is a real problem. You very well may have a better case right there. . . . You know, one of the things with the, with our Japanese relationship, and I’m a big fan of Japan, by the way. I have many, many friends there. I do business with Japan. But, that, if we are attacked, they don’t have to do anything. If they’re attacked, we have to go out with full force.

You understand. That’s a pretty one-sided agreement, right there.

In other words, if we’re attacked, they do not have to come to our defense, if they’re attacked, we have to come totally to their defense. And that is a, that’s a real problem.

Would you be willing to have the US be the first to use nuclear weapons in a confrontation with adversaries?

Trump responds: An absolute last step. I think it’s the biggest, I personally think it’s the biggest problem the world has, nuclear capability. I think it’s the single biggest problem. When people talk global warming, I say the global warming that we have to be careful of is the nuclear global warming.

Single biggest that the world has.

Power of weaponry today is beyond anything ever thought of, or even, you know, it’s unthinkable, the power. You look at Hiroshima and you can multiply that times many, many times, is what you have today.

And to me it’s the single biggest, it’s the single biggest problem.

The discussion inevitably turns to the nuclear deal with Iran—a special bête noire of Trump’s. In the exchanges here he reveals that he does not know some of the basic facts. He makes his often repeated remark that we “gave” the Iranians $150 billion. He surely knows that we “gave back” $150 billion of confiscated funds. This makes less convincing campaign rhetoric. But he adds, “They are, they are now rich, and did you notice they’re buying from everybody but the United States? They’re

So, how stupid is that? We give them the money, and we now say, “Go buy Airbus instead of Boeing,” right? So how stupid is that?

In itself, what you just said, which is correct by the way, but would they now go and buy, you know, they bought 118 approximately, 118 Airbus planes. They didn’t buy Boeing planes, OK? We give them the money, and we say you can’t spend it in the United States, and create wealth and jobs in the United States. And on top of it, they didn’t, they in theory, I guess, cannot do that, you know, based on what I’ve understood. They can’t do that. It’s hard to believe. We gave them $150 billion and they can’t spend it in our country.

When discussing matters nuclear, Trump often resurrects the memory of his uncle John G. Trump, who was a professor at MIT. Actually he was a professor of electrical engineering who worked on radar in World War II. There is no reason to believe he was an authority on nuclear weapons.

If I ever get the chance to talk to Trump I will try to explain to him that this is not a business deal. (In the interviews he claimed that the Iranians were the number-one trading partners of the North Koreans and that this should have been included. The fact that it is the Chinese who are the number-one trading partners and that they were part of the talks seems to have escaped his attention.) The Iranians were months away from having enough fissile material to make weapons. While it is true that some of the provisions will be phased out, this does not mean that, when they are, a bomb will appear. There would be a substantial time before that could happen, and we would have the chance to consider our response. Meanwhile, I should note that the interview with Trump occurred just before the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, involving over fifty nations, without Russia, at the end of March.

There is really only one bright spot and that is what happened in Iran. We have not been able to finalize the next stage of our disarmament agreement with the Russians. The North Koreans are surely going to test again. The Indians and Pakistanis are modernizing their arsenals. There is evidence that some Belgian terrorists had their sights on stealing nuclear material. And in the middle of this there is Trump, a colossus of ignorance.

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Agon: ‘The Acute Edge of Risk’ Jennifer Homans

The curtain rises in silence. The stage is empty except for four men with their backs to the audience evenly spaced across the rear of the stage. They are lean and long in their simple white T-shirts, black tights, and white ballet shoes, and they are doing nothing.

Just standing. There is no set, no decor, no theatrical dressing of any kind— only space, light, and a blue cyclorama stretched behind them like the sky. Faceless, nameless, no smiles, no pretty balletic girls, no lush overture.

Nothing but the four men’s backs and silence.

They swivel in unison to face us. And now it is not really silence anymore: this first move is on a musical rest, and although we don’t hear it the beat is there. Immediately the men catch it, take life, and begin to move. They bend their knees, walk, walk, counting paces, in diagonals, marking time, little catch steps, walking, walking, in twos and fours, until walking becomes dancing and they are off. From this moment until the ballet’s end some twenty-four minutes later, there is no respite: the pulse that began in silence is unrelenting and the four men are joined by eight women—black leotards, flesh tights and shoes, hair pulled tightly back, almost nude.

Agon is twelve bodies in propulsive motion in a suite of dances patterned on seventeenth- century dance and musical forms, refitted to the twentieth century with twelve-tone musical techniques. It is both tonal and atonal, often in uneasy juxtaposition. It is elegant, refined, gay; dissonant, broken, jarring. It is about math: there are four parts, twelve sections, and dances for two, three, four, eight, twelve dancers that accumulate with astonishing precision as dancers tear across the stage, bend, contort, toe shoes digging, pulling, striking their way through intricate footwork, legs flying, switchbacks, acrobatic extensions, gracious bows, physical and musical wit, and always on time (the pulse, the pulse).

Finally we are back to the opening music and the same four men, making their way upstage with sweeping arm gestures, as if they were painting the space all around. They stand facing us for an instant, recalling the opening movement, and then turn abruptly and freeze. The music stops. But there is a final rest—and in its silence, they swivel back to their original pose, backs to the audience.* The pulse *In the 1960 film of the ballet, and probably in its opening-night production in 1957, the dancers froze at the end of the ballet without returning to their original pose, but the return to the facing back pose was part of the original plan indicated in Stravinsky’s published and manuscript scores, and soon became common practice: “The 34

the original cast, the dancers move like the decor—plain, direct, exposed, calm faces, no acting. They look front, bodies front, eyes front—even positions in contrapposto or with a lilting épaulement do not seem lilting but appear direct and straightforward. The conventions of a proscenium stage as a real—or surreal—space had been jettisoned in favor of a poetic indication of infinity: light.

The original lighting by Nananne Porcher was built around ideas devel-

that are rarely strictly classical in form.

The dances are more about the mechanics of the body than about balletic steps, beauty, or line. There is visible effort and the dancers in early films of the ballet can often barely do what’s asked of them, which means we are with them in the raw moment of physical exertion, calculating and improvising as they find a way into and out of a step, which is itself a kind of intimacy. They are in nearly every possible way exposed.

Who are these twelve dancers? Like the twelve tones in the music, they are an ensemble of equals and the traditional hierarchies of ballet no longer exist. Soon after the ballet begins, there is a kind of tableau: they are all there, posed as in a family photo. This is our group and their dances break out from here and pile up, like episodes stacked one on top of another.

The man and woman who will perform the pas de deux are not stars but part of the ensemble and the clock-ticking order of the ballet. Moreover, the three interludes, as Stravinsky noted, “are in the same music but in variation,” which keeps us oriented but also pulls us into a ritual repetition, like an event compulsively replayed with new people; a bow or gesture and a dance is over and gone, but in fact we are gon, which Stravinnot done with it yet. sky neatly wrote in large Agon is a woman’s Greek letters across the world. The four men page of the manuscript open and close the event and printed score, is the and have the first and Greek word for “contest” last breath, but the eight and describes the inwomen dominate: they tensely competitive spirit are confident, even agof Greek social and pogressive, and with the noDiana Adams and Arthur Mitchell in a production of Agon litical life. Stravinsky and table exception of the pas by the New York City Ballet, 1963 Balanchine, and many in de deux, barely in need the audience at the time, of male support. Their would have known of the idea of agon oped for the company by Jean Rosenmusic is often rivetingly chromatic and from Nietzsche who wrote admiringly thal of “light all around”: cold blue they are the source of the ballet’s priof “agonist” culture and its concenlight pouring in from all directions— mal energy and self-assurance, and of its tration on perfecting the human body no follow spots, take out the gels, burn humble grace. They are en pointe, but through discipline and physical trainthe brights—and not just from the foottheir toe shoes are not used to emphaing. This was not only a matter of perlights, but from the side wings too. The size the ethereal and are instead made to sonal vanity or gain: a competition was dancers’ nearly nude bodies appeared dart into the floor, propel the body, mark “won” for the city and seen as public translucent, nothing hidden. The time, extend the leg not up but down good. The idea was not egalitarian— idea—far more radical than any set into the ground, weight low, or precariinstead it was to cultivate an elite based design—was of a stage without shadously suspended. They are instruments on an aristocratic ideal of self. Stravinows or dim corners so that every curve, of mathematical precision, of logic and sky and Balanchine’s Agon was not an line, bone, ligament of the body would calculation, not of emotion or feeling. enactment of a competition in an anbe X-ray visible. It was a paradoxical The shoes, like the costumes and tique setting. It didn’t have to be. Ballet combination of unreal and hyperreal, a light, add to the abstract, intellectual was an Agon all by itself. kind of ghostly or angelic muscularity. atmosphere of the ballet, like an “IBM ballet . . . controlled by an electronic No wonder Balanchine liked to say The dancers’ simple leotards and tights brain,” as Balanchine himself put it. that Agon was just dancers dancing. similarly recalled at once an idealized Even when the woman in the pas de But they dance in certain ways, and not classical human figure and a concrete deux, for example, finds herself on one in others. To begin with, judging from contemporary reference: work clothes, leg in arabesque en pointe, she is not contemporary sources including the a uniform—black and white, impergracefully posed, but fighting to stay 1960 television film featuring much of sonal and anonymous. up, gripping her partner’s hand, arm The movement vocabulary of Agon quivering with the effort as he flips onto is simple, almost pedestrian at times: male dancers take their position as his back on the floor, barely within her walking, small steps, the leg—turn in at the beginning—backs to the audireach. The dime-sized tip of her pointe and turn out—showing the human body ence.” Additional footnotes appear on shoe, which is the only part of her body from every angle, and building to a comthe Web version of this article at www touching the ground, is not raising her .nybooks.com. plicated series of intricate movements stops. They stop. It is over and the curtain falls.

The ballet had two opening nights: a preview performance to benefit the March of Dimes, followed by the premiere on December 1, 1957. George Balanchine was standing as usual in the front wing downstage right watching the ballet unfold, and the moment the curtain fell, as Edwin Denby memorably wrote, “the accumulated momentum of the piece leaps forward in one’s imagination, suddenly enormous. . . . People respond with vehement applause in a large emotion that includes the brilliant dancers and the goofiness of the fun.” In a thrall, the audience rose to a spontaneous ovation, with shouting, whistling, and curtain calls, until finally Balanchine walked from the wing to center stage and bowed humbly before slipping away again. Stravinsky was not there, but excited cables from friends and his son Soulima reported the success: “Have no words telling my enthusiasm . . .your music phenomenal Balanchine dances superb enormous success.” Marcel Duchamp said it felt like the opening night of The Rite of Spring in 1913, almost half a century before.

Martha Swope/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Agon a ballet by Igor Stravinsky, with choreography by George Balanchine, performed by the New York City Ballet at the David H. Koch Theater, New York City, February 24–28, 2016; and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Saratoga Springs, New York, July 21 and 28, 2016

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to the heavens but daring her to balance here on earth.

E

vents unfold. There is no “story” or traditional narrative flow. Instead everything feels compressed and discrete, brick on brick, mass on mass, like a kind of ballet montage. The only story is the pulse—time—that pushes irretrievably on and keeps the dancers—and us—in its grip. We hang on every beat, and the experience is intense, engrossing but also joyful and fun, because it is fun to be on time and in time—to divide, count, multiply, keep up. When on opening night in 1957 Melissa Hayden, a dancer with wonderfully sharp technique, coolly mastered two competing rhythms simultaneously in a complicated dance that resolved with split-second timing on the last note, the audience, Denby reported, “caught the acute edge of risk” and broke into a spontaneous “roar” of applause. The bravura was never the show-off kind, and in a nod to the seventeenth century, the dancers are impeccably behaved: they bow and gesture gracefully even as they speed through the intricate traffic patterns and involved physicality of the dances.

Nowhere in Agon is Balanchine’s strange and unhinged classicism more fully explored than in the pas de deux, which clocks in at six minutes, by far the longest and most sustained dance in the work. When he made Agon, Balanchine started with this dance for Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell and everything flows into and out of its entangled forms. The couple enter in silence and stand at the back corner of the stage. The music begins and they race out across the space on a diagonal, her first, him behind, sweeping legs, double turn (her), double turn (him) in hot pursuit until she dives forward and whips her leg backward, catching him around his head and they stop. In this striking and unstable position, time seems for a moment to suspend.

They gather themselves with small classical steps and a return to etiquette, holding hands, in unison. Then they face each other close—too close—body to body, face to face, but they quickly flip back to back, and she leans, spiderlike, almost crawling on his spine.

And so they begin and continue: back to back, never really looking at each other, limbs interlacing with effort— leaning, pressing, sustaining their mutual dependence in uneasy and precariously counterbalanced partnering.

There is no woman on a pedestal, no romance or courtship here; this dance is between them, and we are watching, spying almost. It is never quite clear who is in control, and there is always the fact of sex in the movements, which are nonetheless performed in the ballet’s perfectly blank, matter-of-fact way—his hand through her crotch, his head diving between her legs, her legs split wide; it is not sexy but sex is there.

Balanchine told Adams and Mitchell, “The girl is like a doll, you’re manipulating her, you must lead her. It’s one long, long, long, long breath,” and Mitchell has said that the key to the dance is for the woman to let the man move her, puppet-like. Indeed in the films Adams appears to move and contort her body almost without will.

She watches him as he takes her foot, guides her leg, holds her ankle, and she twists, turns, supports herself on his May 12, 2016

body as if it were all happening to her.

He doesn’t embrace her, he embraces her leg, or her arabesque; she doesn’t embrace him, but stands en pointe on one leg and places her leg dangerously on his shoulder and waits. By the end he is on his knee to her, gazing up—a courtly pose—but instead of taking her hand, their arms circle, each in their own orbit, without finding their way together—much less to any possible kiss.

On the last beat her arm falls heavily on his head as they both slump, her over him. Defeated.

As a dancer and as a person, Adams was naturally cool and remote, with something anxious and troubled inside.

Mitchell was her opposite: he had “fire” in his movements, as Melissa Hayden once put it, and it was the contrast between them that seemed to interest Balanchine. He tried for years to bring Adams out of herself, encouraging her to do more, let go, really dance, but she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, and her dancing always had a deep formality and selfrestraint. In Agon he found a way: he made a dance about her remoteness and in the end it is Adams who moves us, not in the usual ways by acting or conveying emotion but instead by withholding.

The dance was complicated further still by the fact that Mitchell was an African-American from Harlem and Adams was a pale white beauty from Virginia. The ballet premiered at a particularly tense moment in the civil rights movement, and the simple fact of a black man and a white woman performing publicly half-naked and physically entwined—black purposefully on white, however aestheticized—added to the electric charge in the theater that night.

The dancers were on edge for other reasons. They had become accustomed to hearing the music on the rehearsal piano, played by Balanchine’s friend and colleague the Russian émigré musician Nicholas Kopeikine. Even that had been a struggle: faced with the score in a rehearsal with Stravinsky and the dancers, Kopeikine nervously admitted, “I’m terribly sorry. There are parts of this music I don’t understand,” to which Stravinsky responded, “It’s perfectly all right. I don’t understand them either!” Balanchine counted the music, snapping his fingers, hitting his leg, or bent over the score, and the dancers followed, but some also made up their own counts (Balanchine later cautioned: a five and seven are not the same as a twelve), which meant that when they got on stage there were several competing versions, each dancer hissing counts under her breath as they all strove to keep up and stay together.

Things were made harder still by the fact that when the curtain rose on that opening night, the dancers had barely heard the music with a full orchestra (there was no recording yet). Everything sounded different than it had in the piano rehearsals, and one dancer recalled her panic: “Oh my God, where are my counts?” The dancers say they had to concentrate and listen very, very hard. Meanwhile, the musicians were concentrating and listening hard too: Leon Barzin, who conducted, was not a Stravinsky expert and the musicians had had their own troubles with the irregular tempos and complicated demands of the new score. Add to this the blindingly bright lights hitting the dancers at eye-level from the wings

and it is no wonder many recall feeling unnervingly exposed and alone on the empty stage with no plot, no costumes, only counts—and the fun and pulse of the dancing itself—to hold on to. One dancer later said it was like being on the high peak of a mountain or balancing on a platform suspended in light.

You could fall off.

A

gon has been many things since 1957. New casts, new theater, a changed and expanded company; improved and more subtle and sophisticated dance technique; powerful new technology and lighting design; different bodies that move in different ways. New politics. New civil rights. New fashions. And no one today has to listen very hard to Stravinsky: now we can “whistle [his music] on the street” as Balanchine himself pointed out back in the 1960s. Think of the difference in the pas de deux woman alone, between the cool demure Diana Adams and the impulsive, agonistic Heather Watts, the last dancer to perform the role under Balanchine, who died in 1983. When Adams saw Watts do “her” part, she offered a word of advice: “don’t be so animalistic.” But Watts was animalistic and she was utterly fascinating to watch. Hers was a different Agon. Then there’s been the technically smooth and detached—and very white and blond— Dane Peter Martins, who (among others) danced Arthur Mitchell’s part.

Balanchine changed his own ballet not by changing the steps but by changing the people and adjusting to new times, personalities, circumstances.

Over all of those years, from Adams

to Watts, however, one thing stayed the same: Balanchine. He chose. He coached—Agon was a ballet he did not often delegate—he worked with the musicians, the lighting designers, he “assembled” (as he liked to say) the ballet in all of its many parts. It was his ballet because it was his company.

He was very clear that Agon should be danced only by “particular people. I don’t think that everybody should do that. Later, people do, but I don’t care about it, you see.” He didn’t care because he wasn’t (wouldn’t be) there and it wasn’t his to care for.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find that Agon performed by Peter Martins’s New York City Ballet at the Koch Theater today is a very different ballet. It doesn’t look or feel anything close to the way it did in 1957, or even in 1982. And why should it?

In many ways, Agon has become its opposite: the dancers are fully in control of themselves and their steps and any sense of living at “the acute edge of risk” is gone. The movements that seemed so new and spontaneous, even in the last years of Balanchine’s life, now appear fixed and choreographed and the dancers perform them with consummate skill and ease: Agon has achieved the dubious status of a “classic.” If today’s Agon is a willful and beautifully groomed creature, a dance as smooth as glass performed by serious and accomplished dancers, it would be wrong to assign blame. Indeed, blame would imply that there is a ballet there that they are in some way not getting right. But Agon was never really a ballet. It was always more of a man: George Balanchine.

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35

James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation Nathaniel Rich All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin

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same resistance to alliances that cost him during his lifetime has given shape and power to his afterlife. Now that the old factions have disintegrated, and the national discussion of race has largely retreated from debates over proposed solutions to a debate over whether problems still exist, Baldwin’s work has regained its influence. That his observations about race in America feel as relevant and cutting as ever is as much a testament to his insight as to the level of the current discourse.

Today, like sixty years ago, much of the public rhetoric about race is devoted

fields of Baldwin study: his relationship to the political left and the FBI, his thinking about Africa, and his conflicting views on religion and spirituality. Field emphasizes the paradoxical nature of Baldwin’s various identities.

The strangers of the title are Baldwin’s incarnations: Baldwin the deviant rabble rouser . . . ; Baldwin the civil rights activist . . . ; Baldwin the passé novelist and homosexual sidelined by Black Nationalists; Baldwin the expatriate; and the Baldwin strugUnknown Photographer

Later Novels

by James Baldwin, edited by Darryl Pinckney.

Library of America, 1,075 pp., $40.00 The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

by James Baldwin, edited and with an introduction by Randall Kenan.

Vintage International, 365 pp., $16.95 (paper) “On one side of town I was an Uncle Tom,” said James Baldwin in an interview with The Paris Review, “and on the other the Angry Young Man.” But the list of epithets was much longer than that. Robert Kennedy, apoplectic at Baldwin’s statement in a private meeting in 1963 that black Americans couldn’t be counted on to fight in Vietnam, called him a “nut.” Harold Cruse, who attended the same meeting with Kennedy, complained of Baldwin’s “intellectual inconsistencies,” while Richard Wright, his earliest idol and first champion, considered him an ungrateful apostate. To Eldridge Cleaver, Baldwin was a traitor, with a “grueling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks, particularly of himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites.” British Immigration named him a persona non grata and J. Edgar Hoover, who kept a case file on Baldwin at the FBI that ran 1,884 pages long, declared him “a well-known pervert” and a threat to national security.

Baldwin, for his part, accepted no characterization. “A real writer,” he wrote, “is always shifting and changing and searching.” The credo guided his work and his life. He moved to France at the age of twenty-four to avoid “becoming merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer.” Later he would recoil whenever someone described him as a spokesman for his race or for the civil rights movement. He rejected political labels, sexual labels (“homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual are twentieth- century terms which, for me, really have very little meaning”), and questioned the notion of racial identity, an “invention” of paranoid, infantile minds. “Color is not a human or a personal reality,” he wrote in The Fire Next Time. “It is a political reality.”

His refusal to align himself with any bloc within the civil rights movement isolated him, and he suffered from it—Cleaver’s attack wounded him, as did Wright’s sense of betrayal and Martin Luther King Jr.’s decision to exclude him from the list of speakers at the March on Washington. But the 36

short essays by Coates in The Atlantic about his response to Baldwin’s nonfiction demonstrate the difficulty in pinning Baldwin down. “Baldwin’s writing is roughly contemporaneous with the Civil Rights movement, but he seems to share none of its hope, none of its belief in the power of love to conquer all,” Coates wrote in the first essay. Writing two days later: “My point is that after all of this—after all his hard talk— Baldwin is still talking about love.”

This year on January 18, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the most-viewed speech in America was Chris Rock’s recitation of “My Dungeon Shook.”

Delivered at Harlem’s Riverside Church, about a mile west of Baldwin’s childhood neighborhood, the performance was remarkable both for Rock’s impassioned delivery and his omission of the essay’s most incendiary passage: “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.” There remain limits to what even a figure as respected and outspoken as Rock can say on the subject of race in America today.

T

he audience in Riverside Church listened in reverent silence to Rock’s recitation for eight minutes before they interrupted him with applause. The outburst followed these lines: James Baldwin with Nina Simone, early 1960s

to explaining to an incurious white public, in rudimentary terms, the contours of institutional racism. It must be spelled out, as if for the first time, that police killings of unarmed black children, indifference to providing clean drinking water to a majority-black city, or efforts to curtail the voting rights of minority citizens are not freak incidents but outbreaks of a chronic national disease. Nebulous, bureaucratic terms like “white privilege” have been substituted for “white supremacy,” or “microaggressions” for “casual racism.” “All Power to the People,” “By Any Means Necessary,” and “We Shall Overcome” have yielded to the understated, matterof-fact “Black Lives Matter.” The rhetorical front has withdrawn from “How can we cure this?” to “What is the nature of the problem?”

gling to work out his conflicted relationship to Africa.

turned to Baldwin for answers. The first annual volume of The James Baldwin Review appeared last year1 and at least a dozen books have been published about Baldwin since Barack Obama’s inauguration, most of which comb the embers of his legacy for some new spark; these include monographs about Baldwin’s life in Turkey and in Provence, his views on the criminal justice system, and his writing on music.

One of the more valuable recent entries is Douglas Field’s All Those Strangers, an idiosyncratic biography that focuses on three (somewhat) neglected

As Field examines in turn each of these strangers, he creates a portrait of a writer of “outright contradictions” who sought truth at the expense of ideological purity. Baldwin was often hailed as a prophet but this praise was misplaced: he could not predict the future, but few writers were able to diagnose the present as vividly or unsparingly.

That was enough.

With the man himself having departed the scene three decades ago, contemporary writers have chased his ghost. In The New Yorker, Teju Cole traveled to Leukerbad, the town where Baldwin finished Go Tell It on the Mountain (and the subject of his essay “Stranger in the Village”); in The New York Times, Ellery Washington followed Baldwin’s trail around Paris; and, again in The New Yorker, Thomas Chatterton Williams trespassed onto the property in Saint-Paul- de-Vence where Baldwin spent the final seventeen years of his life. (“Today, among my generation of black writers and readers,” writes Williams, “James Baldwin is almost universally adored.”)

No one has done more to popularize Baldwin in recent years than Ta-Nehisi Coates, who used Baldwin’s address to his nephew in “My Dungeon Shook,” the first part of The Fire Next Time, as a model for Between the World and Me, the most widely read book on race in America in a generation.2 Consecutive

1 Edited by Douglas Field, Justin A. Joyce, and Dwight A. McBride, published by Manchester University Press.

2 Spiegel and Grau, 2015; reviewed in these pages by Darryl Pinckney, February 11, 2016.

Writers, scholars, and activists have

The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.

This is one theme that, in the recent flurry of reappraisal, has evaded emphasis. Baldwin did not only write about what it means to be black in America. He also wrote, as fearlessly as any American writer, about what it means to be white.

He approached the theme obliquely in his earliest essays. “Hatred,” he writes in the conclusion of “Notes of a Native Son,” “which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.” But in the racial stratification of American private and public life, hatred was only one ingredient—is only one ingredient (Baldwin’s work withstands translation to the present tense)—and not a necessary one. The country’s race nightmare could not be examined in isolation, like quadrennial election issues such as immigration policy or Social Security. Race was—is—the fundamental American issue, underlying not only all matters of public policy (economic inequality, criminal justice, housing, education) but the very psyche of the nation. “The country’s image of the Negro,” Baldwin writes in Nobody Knows My Name, “which hasn’t very much to do with the Negro, has never failed to reflect with a kind of frightening accuracy the state of mind of the country.”

That a country, especially one the breadth and size of the United States, The New York Review

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“ ‘Most memoirs about life with a disability almost always move toward a satisfying conclusion of lessons learned,’ Crosby writes. But Crosby knows that there are no satisfying conclusions when one lives ‘a life beyond reason’—and that bit of wisdom alone is cause to read this elegant and harrowing book.” —The Washington Post

LITERATURE/ FICTION

JEWISH STUDIES The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal

Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry Daniel Cross Turner and William Wright, eds.

Alan Robert Ginsberg (See Women’s Studies)

LITERARY CRITICISM/ COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

The Sorrows of Young Alfonso Rudolfo Anaya

Archetypes from Underground: Notes on the Dostoevskian Self Lonny Harrison “. . . a fascinating hypothesis about the Dostoevskian psyche, poised

May 12, 2016

The story of Alfonso, a Nuevo Mexicano, begins with his birth, when the curandera Agapita delivers haunting words into his infant ear. What then unfolds is an elegiac song to the llanos of New Mexico where Alfonso comes of age. As this exquisite novel charts Alfonso’s life journey from childhood through his education and evolution as a writer, renowned Chicano author Rudolfo Anaya invites readers to ref lect on the truths and mysteries of the human condition.

Pub. 3/16. 6 x 9 232 pp.

University of Oklahoma Press ISBN 978-0-8061-5226-5 C/$24.95

Anne Sauvagnargues, translated from the French by Suzanne Verderber and Eugene W. Holland

“One of the most singular lyric voices to emerge in France in the last quarter century.” —Gabriel Levin

Thirteen essays by Deleuze specialist Anne Sauvagnargues— twelve published in English for the first time. Artmachines reveals the continuing potential of Deleuze, Guattari, and Simondon to invent new concepts including geophilosophy, the artmachine, the ritornello, schizoanalysis, and the machinic assemblage.

Pub. 04/16. 6 × 9 in.

312 pp. index.

Edinburgh University Press Distributed by OUP USA in the Americas.

ISBN: 9781474402545 P/$34.95* ISBN: 9781474402538 C/$140.00*

208 pp.

NYU Press ISBN 9781479833535 C/$22.95

MUSIC AND DANCE

“Hard Lines is a bold and compelling anthology. Turner and Wright’s selections focus on verse with ominous qualities, but the human experience and the natural world are encompassed in all their paradoxical dimensions. The cumulative effect is powerful; it’s difficult to put this book down.” — Ernest Suarez, Catholic University, vice president, Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers.

Return Statements: The Return of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy Gregg Lambert

Pub. 4/16. 6 x 9 in. 312 pp.

University of South Carolina Press ISBN 978-1-61117-635-3, C/$49.99; ISBN 978-1-61117-636-0, P/$21.99

How Jazz Trumpeters Play Music Today: Twelve Interviews on Technique, Style, and Aesthetic Thomas R. Erdmann Interviews with twelve performers. This compilation is informative, highly entertaining, and wide-ranging in all aspects of Jazz trumpet playing. A very important book for today’s musician.

Pub. 2016. 336 pp.

Edwin Mellen Press, call for pricing ISBN 978-1-4955-0431-X

Gregg Lambert examines two facets of the return to religion in the 21st century: the resurgence of overtly religious themes in contemporary philosophy and the global “post-secular” turn that has been taking place since September 11. He asks how these two “returns to religion” can take place simultaneously, and explores the relationship between them.

Pub 05/16. 7.5 × 5.3 in.

256 pp. index.

Edinburgh University Press Distributed by OUP USA in the Americas.

ISBN 9781474413916 P/$29.95* ISBN 9781474413909 C/$130.00*

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POLITICAL SCIENCE/ PUBLIC AFFAIRS

PSYCHIATRY/ PSYCHOLOGY

RELIGION

Security/Capital: A General Theory of Pacification George S. Rigakos

The Integration of Immigrants into American Society Mary C. Waters and Marisa Gerstein Pineau, editors; Panel on the Integration of Immigrants into American Society; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine The United States prides itself on being a nation of immigrants, and the country has a long history of successfully absorbing people from across the globe. This study summarizes what we know about how immigrants and their descendants are integrating into American society in a range of areas such as education, occupations, health, and language. The Integration of Immigrants provides a nonpartisan, evidence-based snapshot of the immigrant experience in the United States today.

Rigakos argues that a defining characteristic of the global economic system is its ability to productively sell (in)security to those it makes insecure. The securityindustrial complex is the blast furnace of global capitalism, fueling the perpetuation of the system while feeding relentlessly on the surpluses it has exacted.

Pub 10/16. 5.5 x 8.5 in.

156 pp. index.

Edinburgh University Press Distributed by OUP USA in the Americas.

ISBN 9781474413671 P/$14.95*

Understanding Mental Disorders: Your Guide to DSM-5® Gun Violence and Mental Illness

American Psychiatric Association

Edited by Liza H. Gold, M.D. Robert I. Simon, M.D., co-editor This book presents evidencebased analyses and risk assessment strategies for finding more effective interventions to decrease the costs of the serious public health problems of gun violence and mental illness.

Pub. 2016. 480 pp. Item #62498 American Psychiatric Association ISBN 978-1-58562-498-0 P/$65.00

This book is a consumer guide for anyone who has been touched by mental illness. The common language for diagnosing mental illness used in DSM-5® for mental health professionals has been adapted into clear, concise descriptions of disorders for nonexperts.

Pub. 4/16. 388 pp. Item #62491 American Psychiatric Association ISBN 978-1-58562-491-1 P/$24.95

Jonathan Edwards: America’s Spiritual Founding Father Herbert Richardson The astonishing thing about Jonathan Edwards’s thinking is how his ideas have permeated virtually all areas of American intellectual and political life. Includes his ideas on America, creation, redemption, and Christ.

Pub. 2016. 300 pp.

Edwin Mellen Press ISBN 978-1-63313-004-3, call for pricing

THEATER/FILM/ PHOTOGRAPHY

Pub. 09/15. 6 x 9 in.

520 pp.

National Academies Press ISBN 978-0-309-37398-2 P/$75.00

ISBN 9781474413664 C/$99.95*

Imagined Liberation: Xenophobia, Citizenship, and Identity in South Africa, Germany, and Canada Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley

The Rise and Fall of the Voting Rights Act Charles S. Bullock III, Ronald Keith Gaddie, and Justin J. Wert A detailed and timely history, The Rise and Fall of the Voting Rights Act analyzes changing legislation and the future of voting rights in the United States.

Pub. 4/16. 6 × 9 in.

232 pp.

University of Oklahoma Press ISBN 978-0-8061-5200-4/C $29.95

40

With porous borders, South Africa is incapable of upholding the blurred distinction between endangered refugees and economic migrants. Imagined Liberation asks what xenophobic societies can learn from other immigrant societies, such as Canada, that avoided the backlash against multiculturalism in Europe.

In the Politics, History, and Social Change series Pub 7/15. LC 2014045158 6 x 9 in.

250 pp. notes. bibliography. index.

Temple University Press ISBN 978-1-4399-1190-7 P/$34.95 ISBN 978-1-4399-1189-1 C/$89.50

Fatal Pauses: Getting Unstuck Through the Power of No and the Power of Go Stuart C. Yudofsky, M. D. People can become stuck in many ways and for a wide variety of reasons. The process of discovering why one is stuck, deciding to become unstuck, and then asserting the discipline required to do so is brought to vivid life by one of the most respected psychiatrists of our day.

Pub. 2015. 575 pp. Item #62500 American Psychiatric Association ISBN 978-1-58562-500-0 P/$63.00

Marijuana and Mental Health Edited by Michael T. Compton, M.D., M.P.H. A debate continues within society as to whether marijuana is simply a harmless substance that should be fully legalized, a possibly beneficial treatment for patients with certain illnesses, or a drug with the potential to worsen addiction and cause mental health problems.

This book provides an academic foundation for further study.

Pub. 2016. 272 pp. Item #37008 American Psychiatric Association ISBN 978-1-61537-008-5 P/$59.00

The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes Anne García-Romero A key way to view Latina plays today is through the foundational frame of playwright and teacher Maria Irene Fornes, who has transformed American theater.

Considering Fornes’s legacy, Anne García-Romero shows how five award-winning playwrights continue to contest and complicate Latina theater.

Pub. 3/2016. 5.5 x 8.5 in. 256 pp.

University of Arizona Press ISBN 978-0-8165-3144-8 P/$24.95

NEED T HE SE BOOKS IN A HURRY ?

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The New York Review

the great and greatest playwrights of our time. Johann’s portraits are remarkable and important works of art. This book, like no other, captures a unique and historic literary history.” —Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, American documentary filmmaker and portrait photographer Pub. 3/16. 10 x 10 in.

184 pp. 101 illus.

University of South Carolina Press ISBN 978-1-61117-715-2, C/$39.99

WOMEN’S STUDIES

WASP of the Ferry Command: Women Pilots, Uncommon Deeds

The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal

Sarah Byrn Rickman The story of the pilots who f lew more than nine million miles in 72 different aircraft—115,000 pilot hours—for the Ferrying Division, Air Transport Command, during World War II.

Alan Robert Ginsberg (See History/American)

Pub. 3/16. LC 2015046031 6 x 9 in.

416 pp. 47 b/w photos.

University of North Texas Press ISBN 978-1-57441-637-4 C/$29.95 ISBN 978-1-57441-642-8 E/$23.96

Focus on Playwrights: Portraits and Interviews Susan Johann “Focus on Playwrights is Susan Johann’s magnificent collection of

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41

B

aldwin wrote his essays from a novelist’s perspective, which is to say with a surfeit of empathy and a sensitivity to inner contradiction. The essay that made his reputation, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” was itself an assault on novelists who confused fiction for polemic, and botched both jobs in the process. He understood that in good fiction, as in real life, there tend not to be sentimental heroes and cruel villains but only deeply compromised human beings who struggle with their sins and shortcomings as best they can. He made this point in “Preservation of Innocence,” an obscure 1949 essay unavailable in book form until it appeared in the Library of America’s Collected Essays. Though he was discussing homosexuality, the point applies to race. “A novel insistently demands the presence and passion of human beings, who cannot ever be labeled,” he wrote. “Without this passion we may all smother to death, locked in those airless, labeled cells, which isolate us from each other and separate us from ourselves.” Labels were a source of the problem.

42

The occasional white devil does appear in his novels: the racist cop who taught Rufus Scott “how to hate” in Another Country; the racist cops who pull over a young Leo Proudhammer and his brother in Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone; the racist cop who vindictively targets Fonny in If Beale Street Could Talk. But these are relatively incidental, walk- on parts. In his more involved treatments of the theme, his characters are nuanced, well-intentioned but flawed, human.

In Another Country, three different interracial romances (Rufus and Eric; Rufus and Leona; Ida and Vivaldo) are undone from within by racial anxieties. In each relationship, it is the black character whose love is poisoned by doubt, and who suffers most bitterly. In Tell Me How Long the situation is reversed. Barbara King is a white actress who tries to escape the influence of her wealthy Kentucky family by fleeing to New York, where she falls in love with Leo. But the casual, condescending racism of the bohemian theater scene undermines their union. Barbara is invited to summer stock; Leo is asked to be the company’s driver. “Barbara and I were marooned, alone with our love, and we were discovering that love was not enough—alone, we were doomed.”

When they split, which seems inevitable from the start, Barbara bears the greater cost. “I was discovering what some American blacks must discover,” says Leo, “that the people who destroyed my history had also destroyed their own.”

The self- destructive qualities of bigotry are most vividly evoked in the one novel Baldwin wrote that contained no black characters. In Giovanni’s Room, when David falls in love with Giovanni, and they move in together, he feels alive, free, despite his sexual confusion and shame. When his fiancée Hella returns to Paris, he abruptly leaves Giovanni and renounces their love. “What kind of life can two men have together, anyway?” As he makes his shallow arguments, denying his own love, he feels himself becoming robotic, cruel, cold—not only to Giovanni but also to Hella. “All that had once delighted me seemed to have turned sour on my stomach,” he says.

“I think that I have never been more frightened in my life. . . . Something was gone; the astonishment, the power, and the joy were gone, the peace was gone.”

The passage recalls the conclusion of “Stranger in the Village,” where Baldwin argues that America’s insistence on racial division requires a crippling degree of self- delusion. “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction,” he writes, “and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” The sentiment was put more succinctly in a comment made by Martin Luther King, overheard at a party

by Baldwin, that “bigotry was a disease and that the greatest victim of this disease was not the bigot’s object, but the bigot himself.”

Baldwin made the racial question personal, reducing a society-wide problem to a matter of one’s private conscience. He was not alone in this approach, but he was alone in bringing a novelist’s sensitivity to bear on it.

In Baldwin’s writing racism is, among other things, a failure of empathy. If the

but he put it more directly in a 1961 conversation with Malcolm X:

tendrils of race reached into all aspects of American political social life, so too did it reach into the deepest recesses of the heart. In “A Word from Writer Directly to Reader,” a short statement included in a fiction anthology edited by Herbert Gold (and collected more than half a century later in The Cross of Redemption), Baldwin was asked whether the age in which he wrote made special demands on him as a writer. “The difficulty,” he replied,

If I know that any one of you has murdered your brother, your mother, and the corpse is in this room and under the table, and I know it, and you know it, and you know I know it, and we cannot talk about it, it takes no time at all before we cannot talk about anything. Before absolute silence descends. And that kind of silence has descended on this country.

is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject—his key and ours to his achievement. Nothing, I submit, is more difficult than deciphering what the citizens of this time and place actually feel and think. They do not know themselves. . . .

Guy Le Querrec/Magnum Photos

should have a united “state of mind” may seem a rhetorical embellishment.

But it was Baldwin’s point that the race problem was so ingrained that it did infect the entire nation, from its institutions of justice to the passing encounters of strangers on the sidewalks of major American cities.

No black American failed to grasp the severity of the problem. When white Americans did, it was—is—a symptom of profound self- delusion. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin put it this way: “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.” This denial—and anyone who accepts the status quo is guilty of it—is as corrosive as hatred.

It is corrosive because it requires purposeful blindness.

Baldwin was alluding to the blindness of Robert Kennedy, who could not see why an African-American man who came of age during Jim Crow might not feel inspired to sacrifice his life for his country in Vietnam. He was talking about the inability of white Americans to understand that Elijah Muhammad drew a devoted following not because he spoke about racial separatism but because he spoke about power. Baldwin was also addressing the blind devotion of many white Americans to the national mythology, “that their ancestors were all freedomloving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians. . . .”

While civil rights activists emphasized the cost of racism to its victims, Baldwin emphasized the cost to those in power. “In the face of one’s victim,” he writes in Nobody Knows My Name, “one sees oneself.” A nation that refused to treat or even acknowledge a cancer that had metastasized throughout its entire body could not be considered free. Nor could it see the rest of the world clearly. What moral authority could America assert abroad when its own people were so bitterly divided?

This is the point that Baldwin made to Kennedy at the attorney general’s apartment at 24 Central Park South in 1963.

James Baldwin, France, 1970

How do people come to know themselves? One way is by reading fiction.

The profound act of empathy demanded by a novel, forcing the reader to suspend disbelief and embody a stranger’s skin, prompts reflection and self- questioning. But most people don’t read novels. In his essays and public speeches, Baldwin tried to create a similar effect through allegory and metaphor. At times he reduces the nation to the size of an individual (speaking, for instance, of the American “state of mind”); elsewhere he elevates the individual to the level of an entire race. Baldwin went so far as to suggest that the racial anxieties of white America derive from the most primal, universal fear of all: fear of death. “White Americans do not believe in death,” he writes in The Fire Next Time, “and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.” It is difficult to take this literally—it requires, first of all, that you accept his claim that black people have no fear of death—but as metaphor it stands to reason that confronting the subject of racial iniquity requires questioning one’s most basic assumptions about the workings of American democracy. Can a system of representation be said to be successful when equal representation is denied to so many?

One of Baldwin’s favorite allegories was of the dead body hidden in plain sight. He published a version of it in “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel” (included in Nobody Knows My Name),

Baldwin, in his nonfiction, often recalled scenes from his own life in which he was forced to confront this choking silence. In an essay about Martin Luther King written around this time he describes visiting Montgomery a year after the bus boycott. “I have never been in a town so aimlessly hostile, so baffled and demoralized,” he writes. (A recent stay in Montgomery left me with the impression that, while less openly hostile, the city remains baffled and demoralized.) Baldwin decides to ride the bus. He sits “just a little forward of the center of the bus” while some black passengers sit closer to the driver.

The white passengers endure this affront “in a huffy, offended silence.”

The black protesters had disrupted the natural order of things, causing bafflement and hurt. Without the image of a subservient black class, “the whites were abruptly and totally lost. The very foundations of their private and public worlds were being destroyed.” Few writers more explicitly described the way racist policy contributed to personal trauma, not only for the victims but, to a lesser but still-significant extent, for the empowered.

Silence is another word for ignorance. If in the last five decades the silence around race has decreased in some places—college campuses, hashtag activist feeds, municipal politics in cities like Baltimore, New Orleans, and New York—it has thickened in others. As Baldwin said, you can judge the state of a society’s education level by the quality of its political speeches. By that standard, it feels like an understatement to say that our national intelligence has never been more degraded.

When the ignorance is heavy, the silence about race inhibits honest conversations about war, terrorism, financial inequality, immigration, health care.

The result of this can be seen in any presidential debate of this cycle.

Baldwin’s novels and essays describe a nation suffering from a pain so profound that it cannot be discussed openly. This was not a pessimistic view; it was, rather, deeply optimistic. It suggested that most people, deep down, wanted to resolve the crisis—that they were not apathetic or, in Baldwin’s term, brutally indifferent. Today it can be difficult to preserve this optimism.

Still there are strong indications that there is more pain than indifference.

You can tell this by the general level of fear, which is, after all, the source of that pain. It has risen to the surface, often reaching the level of total panic, evident in the calls to “take our country back,” to “reignite the promise of America,” to “abolish the IRS,” to “restore America’s brand,” and the many other revanchist sentiments that dominate the political discourse. These messages do not ring of indifference. They are expressions of great terror.

The New York Review

Last year, without much public notice, the United States crossed a threshold: for the first time in history, more than half of the nation’s public school students belonged to racial minorities. What happens when the ma-

jority and the minority trade places?

Do the categories break down? Will there be fire this time? We’ll soon find out. For now, we can do no better than turn to Baldwin for our answer:

Majorities [have] nothing to do with numbers or with power, but with influence, with moral influence, and I want to suggest this: that the majority for which everyone is seeking which must reassess

and release us from our past and deal with the present and create standards worthy of what a man may be—this majority is you. No one else can do it.

Art That Reclaims the Ignored Sanford Schwartz Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, February 5–April 27, 2016; and the Museo Jumex, Mexico City, June 9–September 17, 2016.

Catalog of the exhibition edited by Nancy Spector and Nat Trotman.

Guggenheim Museum/ DelMonico/Prestel, 379 pp., $52.00

Peter Fischli and David Weiss/Jason Klimatsas/Fischli Weiss Archive, Zurich

struction sites. They found a way to make an artwork out of questions—often ephemeral, unanswerable ones.

There are also unclassifiable forays into the everyday.

The 1990 Son et lumière—or Sound and Light, the title of nighttime shows outside historic buildings where a soundtrack and beams of light attempt to bring the place’s past alive—is one such foray and a takeoff of genius. In Fischli and Weiss’s version, a Swiss Army–issue flashDelightful and funny aren’t light has been trained on a words one regularly associlittle plugged-in turntable ates with contemporary art, on which a plastic, faceted but they certainly fit aspects cup—held from falling off by of the work of Peter Fischli a strip of masking tape—rolls and David Weiss. At least, I back and forth. The light, reheard a fair amount of gigfracted through the facets, gling at the Guggenheim Musends ever-moving shards of seum’s beautifully laid-out lumière onto the wall, and retrospective of the Swiss colthe son comes as the cup goes laborative team. Not that they here and there. This is the Small clay sculptures from Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s series Suddenly This Overview (1981–present), were exactly entertainers. sweetest sound and light show which depict, according to Sanford Schwartz, ‘historical events, moments that might have been, and visualizations (One speaks of their partneryou will ever see. of age-old sayings and concepts we believe we ought to know,’ as well as ‘everyday scenes and objects.’ ship in the past tense because, Yet at the Guggenheim we Clockwise from top left: Book and Reader, Galileo Galilei Shows Two Monks That the World Is Round, although Fischli is sixty-three, are given only the main asThe Alchemist I, and The Dog of the Inventor of the Wheel Feels the Satisfaction of His Master.

Weiss died in 2012, at sixtypects of Fischli and Weiss’s five.) In work straddling phooutput. Many of their works tography, sculpture, films, installation were commissioned and, tied to particthemselves as a team), it is comprised uids, explosions, springboards, fuses, art, and much else, they were more like ular sites, cannot be in the exhibition. of a number of color photographs that fires, steam, mattresses, chairs, pails, wry magicians—and magicians with an (They are illustrated and discussed in they took of scenes of buildings, roads, and much else all take their part in underlying moral bent. its accompanying catalog, which, with events, excursions, and catastrophes— nudging, flipping, and propelling one Their subject was the everyday, or its clear, perceptive descriptions and often with sausages as their main another along. The film, made in 1985 real, world we all see and don’t pay many quotes from the artists, forms an characters. and 1986, is like a surreptitious look much attention to and the random noinvaluable guide to their art.) For the Seemingly anything the artists had at the strenuously organized life obtions and musings that pass through new Swiss stock exchange building, for lying around—cigarette butts, toilet jects make for themselves when people our minds and that we tend to forget. instance, in 1992, they placed museumpaper, an egg carton—were props. In aren’t around. The Way Things Go is Gentle, playful, and ironic, they sought like vitrines everywhere, including the Fashion Show, sausages parade by, on for many the first piece by Fischli and to reshape ordinary and omnipresent garage, and put in them store-bought a runway where the lights are sprigs of Weiss that they encounter, and it is objects and thoughts—without, in the objects of every description, from toys parsley, wearing different kinds of cold surely their most widely known work. process, losing sight of the ordinarior knives to an accordion or a perfume cuts, while a recreation of a scene in the ness. Their ultimate point, one bebottle. A work realized for an art fair in James Bond movie Moonraker takes ut at the present show the movie lieves, was a kind of reclamation of the Münster, Germany, in 1997, was a funcplace in a refrigerator. In At the Carpet takes its place as one of a number of ignored. tioning flower and crop garden, and for Shop, cornichons are contemplating novel and at first sight completely unThe Guggenheim’s show provides the a German power plant that commisvarious throw rugs (stacks of pimento connected ways of reclaiming the igfirst comprehensive look New York has sioned a piece—to take one more exloaf), though the star attraction is probnorable. For viewers coming to the had of artists whose names have been ample—there now exists a snowman, ably the big, round area rug (a slice of artists for the first time (and even for familiar in the art world, and who have dating from 1987 to 1990, that is kept in mortadella). those who have seen a handful of their been seen in good-sized shows that existence year-round through a cooling Fischli and Weiss’s transformations shows over the years), the Guggenheim traveled to American cities in previous system that the artists devised with the became far more challenging, but exhibition might initially be mistaken years, but who remain, I think, barely engineers. about their work one often finds the for a group show, or a jigsaw puzzle known to the general museum-going Fischli and Weiss never spelled out same combination of innocence and waiting to be put together. In addition public. The Zurich-based duo, who met the meaning of their art. It is clear, wit, impromptu manual dexterity and to their epic Way Things Go, Fischli in 1977—they connected through the though, that they were opposed to a desire to experiment with whatever and Weiss made other films and vidnew punk rock scene of that moment, the self-important and to hierarchies, is at hand. Their splashiest experiment eos. As still photographers, they travwhich also influenced art and political whether in the art world or anywhere, with what was, roughly speaking, at eled everywhere, taking pictures of the activism—were in tune with each other and on the side of the reality we perhand is the thirty-minute movie The world in what are essentially tourist from the first (and Fischli, since his haps undervalue. Moralists though Way Things Go, a masterpiece of enshots (forming a compendium entitled partner’s death, has continued on projthey were, they were always a step or gineering, physics, chemistry, and hard, Visible World and dated 1986–2012); ects left unfinished). Many of the halltwo ahead of their audience in finding ingenious work that is guaranteed to and another collection of photos, Airmarks of the vast amount of work they ways to fashion the uncenteredness hold the full attention of people seven ports, is of jets idling on the ground created in the thirty-three years that they believed in. Question Projections or eight years old and up. or being serviced. The artists made they functioned together are present in is a memorable and novel way of preIn this chain-reaction movie, which figurative sculpture in clay and created their first venture. Called Sausage Sesenting it. The work is set in a darkened can be seen in a bay on the museum’s installation art on the theme of conries (and made before they thought of room at the top of the Guggenheim ramp, tea kettles, auto tires, slurpy liq-

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ramp where a viewer finds, projected point on the Guggenheim’s ramp we standard-issue, mass-produced chairs, cause of their titles, and the titles make onto the wall from a battery of slide become surrounded on every side for desks, tools, and appliances—cast a us wonder how different these works are projectors, question after question some distance by 168 diminutive gray spell. Knowing that some pieces are from New Yorker cartoons. The First (written out, in flowing, curvy lines, (or unfired) clay sculptures, most on painted foam but not knowing which Fish Decides to Go Ashore, for instance in German, Italian, Japanese, and separate white pedestals and some on makes everything seem animate. (you can imagine what it looks like), is English). the wall. Seeing this vast assembly of The work sites, which Fischli and a subject that we half-believe we have The questions are those that ocsmall works from far away (a possibilWeiss began fashioning in the early seen in the magazine. The difference is curred to the artists over many years. ity few museums can offer as well as the 1990s, are very much outgrowths of the clay, which often has its own life. AlAlthough the question “Can I reGuggenheim) is like viewing a major their concerns. The tableaux certainly though Fischli and Weiss each made his establish my innocence?” seems perfleet at sea. make us rethink (or at least look twice own sculptures, we seem to look at a sinsonal to them—surely their Sausage Each of the little gray sculptures at) objects we take for granted; and gle house style. It is one where the tenSeries and Visible World, their tour of seems to present a different miniaturmaking work environments into art is sion derives from seeing in what detail the planet’s beauty spots, owe a great ized experience from the one next to ingeniously in accord with the moral the artists have built up, or carved out, deal to a desire for innocent looking— it, and once you start looking you don’t underpinnings of the artists’ endeavor, forms from such a slablike, obduratethe questions in general don’t get us want to miss any. It is a joy to go from a their sense that art is, firstly, work and looking, and unpromising material. closer to the persons Peter Fischli and presentation of a slice of real life (a car not the expression of individual genius.

David Weiss. Perhaps due to their quion a mountain road; a boot; a plate of One of their videos, Untitled (Venice arving is an ingredient in what for etly militant belief that we can all do olives) to the deadpan absurdity of The Work), is a ninety-six-hour-long acme is Fischli and Weiss’s richest sewith fewer hot-air personalities, one Invention of the Miniskirt (she stands cumulation of scenes of people going ries: their creations of work sites. At learns strikingly little about the artin her skirt as a tailor cuts part of it off), about their various jobs; and an aspect the top ramp of the Guggenheim you ists’ personal lives in the Guggenheim’s or to jump from the remarkably unof The Way Things Go that struck Fihefty catalog. schli was how much the making In Question Projections we of that movie was a group, or are given instead a peek into leaderless, act. “Who is the artthe minds of most people, ist?” he asks about it in an interwhere serious, absurd, spur-ofview in the catalog. the-moment, and fantastical The polyurethane installathoughts are forever flowing in tions, moreover, are about the and out of each other. The point labor that goes into art. They would seem to be the connectgive us the backstage life of edness of these thoughts. It is nearly every gallery and muunderscored by the clip at which seum presentation. Whether or the questions come and go, and not the artists intended it, the by the fact that most viewers spirit of these installations is not probably look for the questions only irony, or a transformation in only one of the languages but that makes one question what can’t help paying a little attention is real, but realism itself. The to those they don’t understand. spaces that these polyurethane Yet I, for one, found hierarchies buckets and boards are set in, asserting themselves. we come to feel, are not empty Questions on the order of backgrounds. As we get our “Should I eat chalk?” or “Does bearings on these works, we can a ghost drive my car at night?” see that each bay at the museum seem merely fey and like filler. has a subtly different installation But “Can one do everything (or two), and the spaces become wrong?” or “Why is it called imaginable as actual rooms. We daybreak?” have a poetic sublook at the carpentry and cleanPainted polyurethane foam sculptures of buckets, cleansers, paint rollers, and other items in Fischli and Weiss’s stance, and the question “Is a ing materials—and at the cigaseries of work sites (1991–present), installed at the Guggenheim. ‘Once you understand that each (perfectly mistake around today that’s as rettes stubbed out in ashtrays, realized) item you see is phony—and, as carved foam, is light as a feather and easily smashed,’ big as the idea of the earth being the ripped- open bag of candy, Sanford Schwartz writes, ‘you may find it hard to tear yourself away from looking.’ flat?” is an oddity from left field and the bottle of Tylenol left in a that puts one on pause. Thomas corner—and think of the workers come across bays that look like they are eventful subject of waiting for an elevaAquinas and Woody Allen might both who might have been here. The scenes being made ready to present art (or are tor (a person stands before two closed be absorbed by “Is my indecisiveness before us seem as much portraits of acbeing fixed up after some displays have doors) to The Landing of the Allies in proof of my free will?” tivity as of being finished for the day. come down). Why, we wonder, has the Normandy (the concise version). There In some sense, Fischli and Weiss’s museum forgotten about this? Left in are folk-art-like illustrations of sayings work sites show them to be realists in uddenly This Overview, which the stacks on the floor or propped against or situations—in Artist and Audience a traditional ways. Presenting spray cans, artists began working on in 1981 and a wall, or seen in the form of pedestals singing bird is appreciatively looked pizza boxes, and broken-in work shoes, kept returning to, tackles in an entirely or boxes of all sizes, are wood boards, at by another bird—and moments of the artists made me think of the Chardifferent way what passes through the many with white primer slapped on and inspired slapstick, such as Free Market din who took scullery maids and govminds of most of us. The many small many bruised through handling. On a Economy, imagined as an intertwined ernesses for his central characters and clay sculptures that make up the opus large work table there are cleansers pile-up of thrusting, grasping buffoons. of the Degas who for a period painted present historical events, moments that and containers of glue, power tools and In some of their best pieces, Fischli laundresses and milliners. Fischli and might have been, and visualizations of paint rollers in their pans, and markers, and Weiss work as dramatists, inventWeiss’s trompe-l’oeil realism actually age- old sayings and concepts we bepliers, and plastic utensils. A club chair ing new ways to see the quotidian spirit quite closely recalls the paintings of lieve we ought to know. But the sculptouched with plaster dust is in a corner, they celebrate. In Mr. and Mrs. Einbins of old books and other leftovers by tures, most of which can be held in two and paint-bespattered work shoes are stein Shortly After the Conception of the late-nineteenth- century American hands, are also of everyday scenes and set to the side. I could add juice carTheir Son, the Genius Albert, we look painter John F. Peto. objects—a woman at a supermarket, tons, pallets, rolls of tape, a level, soda down into an ultra-plain little room But the Swiss artists’ tools and bota housing development—and these cans, rubber work gloves—and more. with a person sleeping in each of the tles aren’t stand-ins for emotional pupieces fit right into the flow. We feel, For viewers coming to the Swiss arttwo single beds, blankets neatly drawn rity, which Chardin conveys, and they with the endless variety, that we are ists for the first time, the experience up. The only problem with such a condon’t suggest the tedium of labor, which seeing every person’s inner and outer of these work sites will be, I believe, ception of the ordinariness that underDegas can convey. Peto’s affinity for, it lives. one of perplexity followed by dawning lies the momentous is that it takes the seems, the pathos of objects is absent.

Fischli and Weiss liked to do some incredulity and then smiles, because bloom off such related pieces as Anna In all their work Fischli and Weiss give of their works in great number. Viseverything we see has been carved O. Dreaming the First Dream Interus, rather, a comic, unexpected, rejuible World and Airports are each made out of polyurethane foam, which has preted by Freud (set in a mousy, undervenated realism—or, really, awareness up of many hundreds of examples, the then been painted. Once you underwhelming bedroom), or The Dog of the of the mundane, their muse. They clear point presumably being the erasure of stand that each (perfectly realized) Inventor of the Wheel Feels the Satisa space where we can take a breather distinctions between important and item you see is phony—and, as carved faction of His Master. That Einstein’s from heroes and villains and stark, inunimportant. But the experience of foam, is light as a feather and easily parents might be the most memorable flammatory contrasts. What one comes these photo collections is such that smashed—you may find it hard to tear characters in Fischli and Weiss’s mamaway from the show with, however, isn’t after seeing a few (this is particularly yourself away from looking. Even in moth run-through of life is fitting since a sermon on parameters, modesty, and the case with Airports) our minds wanphotographs in the catalog, these and their art is about relativity, if not exthe equality of everything. It is the opder and we move on. With Suddenly other polyurethane carvings—someactly Einstein’s version of it. posite: a sense of amazement in the This Overview the sense of abundance times seen in warehouselike settings Many if not most of the clay sculpface of the artists’ ability to find so is vividly experienced. At a certain where they have been placed among tures take on their full meaning bemany ways to reimagine sanity.

David Heald/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

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May 12, 2016

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The Nepal Catastrophe Joshua Hammer

Battles of the New Republic: A Contemporary History of Nepal

by Prashant Jha. London: Hurst, 358 pp., $30.00 (paper) (distributed in the US

by Oxford University Press) A few minutes before noon on April 25, 2015, the Great Himalayan Thrust, a fault line between the Indian and Eurasian continental plates, ruptured deep beneath Gorkha district, fifty miles northwest of the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu. The sudden slippage caused an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale that sent seismic waves ripping through the Kathmandu Valley, the site of three ancient cities— Patna, Kathmandu, and Bhaktapur— and seven UNESCO World Heritage sites.

In sixty-five seconds, much of Nepal’s cultural patrimony was damaged or destroyed. One hundred eighty people died when the two-hundred-foot-high Dharahara Tower in Kathmandu, built in 1832, with an eighth-story observation deck that overlooked the valley, collapsed. Centuries- old temples, including the Vatsala Devi, famed for its sandstone walls and gold-topped pagodas, fell in Bhaktapur Durbar Square, the plaza in front of the royal palace of the old Bhaktapur kingdom. In Durbar Square in Kathmandu, more than half of the forty temples were damaged or destroyed. About 1,800 people in the valley were killed.

Yet the ruin in Kathmandu was incidental to an even greater tragedy. As Thomas Bell, a former Economist and Telegraph correspondent and a longtime Kathmandu resident, writes in Kathmandu, his sprawling history and memoir of Nepal and its fast-growing capital: In fact the [worst] disaster was not in Kathmandu, where everyone expected it, but in the countryside, especially in districts directly above the rupture. Landslides were set off in many places. The village of Langtang, 60 kilometres north of Kathmandu, was obliterated by an avalanche that buried three-storey houses and killed . . . 300 people. . . .

Most rural houses were of two or three storeys, built of stones bound together with mud, and in many villages most houses were destroyed.

It was very fortunate that at midday on a Saturday most people were outdoors. Altogether about 9,000 people were killed and over two million were made homeless, a few weeks before the monsoon.

The number of dead would have been far greater had it not been for the rapid response of both international and domestic rescue teams. Within a couple of days, Chinese, Indian, and US military rescue teams began carrying relief supplies to remote airstrips and stricken villages, and Nepalese police and soldiers fanned out across the country, pulling thousands from the rubble.

Small private groups acting without 46

licenses or oversight also carried out much of the initial relief work. These ad hoc NGOs raised money from Facebook and crowd sourcing, signed up hundreds of volunteers, and delivered tents, medical equipment, and emergency rations to remote areas. Typical of these groups was the Yellow House, formed two days after the disaster by, among others, Ben Ayers, a US climber and development expert, and a Nepalese photographer, Nayantara Gurung Kakshapati. The group enlisted volunteers ranging from Indian surgeons to, Kakshapati says, “hippie-New Age types” who had been attending a rave

about its leaders. Millions of homeless Nepalese suffered through one of the harshest winters in decades. They continue to live in tents and flimsy huts, and no end to their suffering is in sight.

One recent morning I visited Dur-

bar Square, in the historic heart of Kathmandu. A vast complex of Hindu temples dating to the early seventeenth century, the plaza stands opposite the former palace of the monarchs who ruled this city-state before King Prithvi Narayan Shah of the Gorkha Kingdom unified Nepal in 1769. During the 1960s Ismail Ferdous/Redux

Kathmandu

by Thomas Bell.

London: Haus, 500 pp., $29.95

The remains of the Dharahara Tower in Kathmandu, four days after the earthquake, April 2015

festival near Kathmandu when the disaster struck. The Yellow House dispatched hundreds of missions into remote areas and became the fourthlargest distributor of aid in the month after the earthquake.

These heroic efforts stood in marked contrast to the passivity of Nepal’s government. The prime minister at the time, Sushil Koirala, who was traveling abroad, learned about the earthquake in a phone call from the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, and didn’t make a public appearance for days afterward. Then, instead of moving forthrightly to take advantage of $4.4 billion in reconstruction funds pledged by sixty nations at a donor conference in Kathmandu, Nepal’s three main political parties bickered and jockeyed for control of the money. Nine months went by before they agreed to establish a Reconstruction Authority—a prerequisite of the donors before they would release the funds.

The crisis was compounded by an uproar over the country’s new constitution, a hastily written, illconceived document that enraged the long- oppressed and ignored minority groups living in Nepal’s border zone with India. Last September, protesters tacitly supported by India organized a six-month-long blockade of the border that cut off oil supplies and paralyzed the landlocked country. The yearlong crisis has exposed both the dysfunction of the political system that replaced the monarchy in 2006 and the deep fault lines that run through Nepal’s society.

It has shaken the country’s faith in democracy, and heightened cynicism

and 1970s, when Kathmandu was the most popular destination on the hippie trail through Asia, young Europeans and Americans gathered to smoke pot on the steps of the square’s centerpiece, the Maju Deval, otherwise known as the Hippie Temple, a triple-roofed pagoda rising from a nine-tiered ochre platform. Just south of the temple is the ancient alleyway known briefly as Freak Street, a hippie nirvana that was lined by government-licensed shops that legally sold marijuana and hashish.

I spent many pleasant hours sitting on the steps of the Hippie Temple—famed for its erotic carvings on the roofs and shiva lingam, a phallic fertility symbol—thirty-five years ago, before beginning a seven-week trek around the Annapurna Range in western Nepal.

This was at the tail end of an era when the mystical appeal of the country’s capital was matched by the monarchy’s laissez-faire attitude. Bell writes:

struck, I was told by Rajesh Giri, a tour guide, “it collapsed in a cloud of dust.”

Today, all that is left of the Hippie Temple is the empty base. The adjacent Kasthamandap, an elegant three-tiered pagoda constructed around 1600, also collapsed, killing several people inside.

Now wooden buttresses prop up teetering buildings, and police tape marked “danger” keeps much of the square offlimits. Nearly a year after the earthquake, reconstruction has yet to begin.

“Our politicians talk and talk, and nothing gets accomplished,” Giri told me, gesturing to an ornate pagoda decorated with carvings of the elephant god Ganesh that leaned at a precarious angle against the top floors of a former royal palace. The earthquake had torn a hole in the city’s heart, he said, erasing a fundamental part of Nepalese national identity.

To a great extent that identity was forged by the Shahs, who ruled from Durbar Square as absolute monarchs until 1846, when a new dynasty, the Ranas, seized control, appointed themselves hereditary prime ministers, and reduced the Shahs to figureheads. The Shahs regained power in a 1951 coup, and ruled with iron fists for the next fifty-five years. When I flew to Nepal from Bangkok on Royal Nepal Airlines nearly four decades ago, the bespectacled visage of King Birendra hung in every office and adorned every bank note. The absolute monarch presided over a stratified system that, as Bell writes, was dominated by two castes, the Brahmins and the Chhetris: The high castes of the hill villages had ruled the city, and the rest of the country, for the last few hundred years. Politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, and journalists were overwhelmingly Brahmins. Chhetris—one step below them in the hierarchy—provided the old elite of the monarchy, aristocracy and army officers. . . . There were about 100 castes, linguistic and ethnic groups in Nepal, most with further subdivisions among them, all living together in Kathmandu and regarding one another with a mixture of tolerance, anxiety, mild bemusement, indifference, and contempt.

In 1996, however, a societal upheaval

Kathmandu was cleaner and cooler than India, without the hassle and the sexual harassment. Drugs were legal, the locals seemed tolerant, and the foreigners were grateful to be left alone. They formed insular communities. . . . They smoked a prodigious amount of dope.

began to convulse Nepal. A small band of Maoist rebels declared a “People’s War” against the government, called for the collectivization of private land, and built a rudimentary arsenal. The Nepali journalist Prashant Jha, in his authoritative Battles of the New Republic: A Contemporary History of Nepal, which follows the country’s tumultuous path from the Maoist rebellion to the years just before the earthquake, writes that the first two guns obtained by the Maoists

In the late 1970s the government tired of the hippies, made marijuana and hashish illegal, and expelled many expatriates who had hung around for months or, in some cases, years. The Maju Deval survived a powerful 1934 earthquake largely intact, but it wasn’t as lucky this time. When the quake

were the same rifles which had been air- dropped by the US in 1961 to help Tibetan rebels and incite a rebellion against [Communist] China. The irony could not have been starker. Many Nepali Maoist leaders received their initial armed training from retired soldiers The New York Review

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47

The Maoists launched their war with attacks on isolated military posts deep in the foothills. They seized more weapons, recruited fighters among the poorest of the poor, drove out the police from remote villages, executed landholders and “collaborators,” and gained control of much of the country.

Then, in June 2001, five years into the rebellion, the beleaguered Shah dynasty suffered a cataclysmic blow.

Crown Prince Dipendra, a volatile, Eton- educated twenty-nine-year- old with a fondness for weaponry and a reputation for torturing house pets as a child, gunned down nine family members, including King Birendra, with a collection of semiautomatic rifles that he had stored in his bedroom, and then shot himself. According to one account, the crown prince was angered about his parents’ refusal to sanction his marriage to a Nepali woman of a slightly lower caste; others say that he was enraged at his father for ceding power to Nepal’s Parliament following demonstrations in 1990.

The killings shocked the Nepalese public, and tarnished the image of the Shah dynasty. Maoist leaders alleged that the king’s brother, Gyanendra, who succeeded Birendra, had orchestrated the assassinations in order to step up the war against the rebels. The charge was patently false, but it gained credence after the new monarch sidelined the ineffectual police force and ordered the Nepalese army to attack the Maoists. The strategy backfired: the troops tortured and murdered thousands of civilians, and the rebel ranks swelled with new recruits.

In 2006, with the two sides fighting to a stalemate, a coalition of prodemocracy groups joined forces with the Maoists and mobilized thousands of people in the streets of Kathmandu.

The protests forced the abdication of the autocratic and unpopular Gyanendra, and led to the establishment of Nepal’s first democratic republic. It was a moment of “tremendous optimism,” recalls Devendra Raj Panday, a veteran human rights activist who marched in the protests that year. As Bell writes in Kathmandu, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed at the end of 2006 provided a road map to the new republic: The Maoist army would be integrated into the national army, which would be reformed. Until then the former fighters would wait in camps monitored by the United Nations. The Maoists would return the land they had captured, mostly from absentee landlords, and there would be “scientific land reform” in return. As the Maoists had demanded, there would be elections to a constituent assembly which would write a new constitution, to address historic iniquities and create a “new Nepal.”

In 2008, the Maoists won a plurality of the votes in Nepal’s first post48

and spoke languages which were monarchy election, and Ram Baran distinct from the hill Nepalis. Their Yadav, a former Maoist leader, became national loyalties were suspect, the prime minister. Ex-guerrillas who and the Palace felt that this was Intwo years earlier had been wearing ragdia’s natural constituency which it tag fatigues and attacking police posts could use to weaken the regime, or assumed command of ministries and even to “break the country.” millions of dollars in donor funds. Surprisingly, the Maoists established themIn recent years, political parties repselves as centrists—a finance minister resenting the Madhesis became more won plaudits from the World Bank and vocal and better organized, and they the International Monetary Fund—but joined forces with the Maoists to push the optimism didn’t last. The Maoists for a new constitution. They wanted to went from “killing people and being replace Nepal’s centralized government killed to going after the same perks of with a federal system that would carve power as everybody else,” says Panday. the country into self-ruling enclaves.

“They became just like the mainstream The Madhesis sought a single province parties—with the same corruption as running across the Terai—the low-lying the rest of them.” Politics remained wetlands and forests that form a narrow a musical chairs game now waged by strip along Nepal’s eight-hundred-mile three main parties battling for spoils border with India—unifying the group and patronage. Governments rose and and giving it control over the crossfell—a total of eight since 2008—and accomplished little. When Myanmar’s democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi visited Kathmandu in April 2014 and was introduced to Nepal’s top political leaders, she joked, “Never have I been in a room with so many former prime ministers.”

Ben Ayers, the cofounder of the Yellow House, got an intimate look at Nepal’s corruption after the earthquake. Two weeks into his fund-raising drive, the government bank began diverting all international relief money A Nepali soldier at the Kal Bhairav Temple, into an account controlled by Durbar Square, Kathmandu, after the earthquake the prime minister. “Nobody had any illusions that the govborder trade routes. The hill elites put ernment was going to do anything with forth a counterproposal: slicing the it,” I was told by Ayers, who has lived country into half a dozen provinces that and worked in development in Nepal would run from north to south, giving since 2002. “So we had to smuggle in the hill-dwelling Brahmins and Chhecash. We drove bundles of it across the tris a majority in each zone. border from New Delhi.” Ayers and After the earthquake, Nepal’s main his fellow activists also discovered that parties decided to push through a final tents, roofing tin, and other vital relief version of the constitution. “The politisupplies had been diverted to the black cians had been excoriated for vanishmarket. “They were being hijacked by ing after the quake, and they wanted to the parties to distribute to their own redeem themselves,” says Kunda Dixit, constituents,” he says. He was forced to editor of The Nepali Times, the counpurchase tarpaulin for tents in factories try’s most prestigious English-language in Bihar and smuggle them on night newspaper. But in a significant misbuses to Kathmandu. “The message calculation, the parties divided up the [from the parties] is, ‘we are the ones country according to the hill elites’ prowho gave you the roofing tins, rememposal. When violent protests erupted in ber us,’” said Ayers. the Terai, Nepalese security forces shot Ayers watched in disgust as the first dead forty demonstrators. Madhesi head of the Nepalese Reconstruction youths threw up barricades at the borAuthority, a distinguished figure in the der crossings with India, and set fire to Nepal Congress Party, the country’s tanker trucks attempting to bring fuel oldest party, was blocked from carryinto Nepal. “Nepal was polarized,” says ing out his duties by the rival Unified Bell, “and it was a self-inflicted injury.”

Marxist-Leninist Party. “They want The Indian government allegedly their 15 to 20 percent [cut] of the $4.4 abetted this blockade by ordering its billion,” Ayers said. The UML eventually succeeded in driving him out and customs agents not to let the tankers putting its own man in the job. through the crossing points. Leaders of India’s Hindu nationalist ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), were ince last fall, Nepal’s recovery has reportedly furious about a clause in Nebeen slowed further by a clash between pal’s new constitution that declared the the elites in the hills and the Madhecountry a “secular” state. There was sis, or “plain dwellers,” who have lived also much anger about what was seen on both sides of the Nepal–India boras the shortchanging of the Madhesis. der for centuries and have strong ethWith only 10 percent of Nepal’s usual nic and family ties in India, especially fuel supplies entering the country at Bihar. Tensions between these groups border crossings, helicopters were have long been a fact of Nepali life. As grounded, road traffic paralyzed. GenPrasant Jha, a Madhesi, writes in Baterators shut down; many people, even in tles of the New Republic: urban areas, were forced to cook their meals with firewood. Some fuel entered The ruling elite just did not trust Nepal through the black market—conthe Madhesis. They were seen as trolled by the party elites—and China “migrants,” “people of Indian oriarranged an emergency convoy of oil gin,” or “Indians,” who had contintankers down a rough, quake- damaged ued to maintain cultural practices road through the high Himalayas. But

S

“the suffering in the hills was tremendous,” Dixit told me, “and people died as a result.”

Days before I arrived in Nepal in February, the government reached an agreement with the Madhesis to lift the six-month-old blockade in exchange for a promise of a constitutional amendment to redraw the provincial boundaries. The demonstrators had been showing up in fewer numbers over the last couple of months, and knew that support for their cause was dwindling.

And India, which has always sought to maintain influence over Nepal, had kept up constant pressure on the government to grant the Madhesis concessions.

Early

one morning I set out from Kathmandu in a four-wheel- drive vehicle for Sindhupalchowk district, just east of Gorkha, where some of the worst earthquake damage had occurred. According to government statistics, 96.8 percent of the district’s houses were destroyed, 3,550 people were killed, and thousands injured.

I was joined on the journey by Pradip Khatiwada, the coordinator of the National Volunteering Program, one of the many unlicensed groups that are providing building materials and other supplies to villagers who had been abandoned by the Nepali government. His group has seven thousand volunteers, and is active in fourteen out of seventy-five districts. Driving out of the Kathmandu Valley, we passed long lines of motorcyclists waiting to fill their tanks with their allotted five liters of fuel. The blockade had lifted days earlier, but India was sending only 70 percent of its normal fuel supplies, and the shortages continued. “During the worst of the fuel crisis lines were three miles long, and people waited for twelve hours or more,” he told me. “So this is a big improvement.”

A few miles down a dirt track past the heavily damaged district capital, Chautara, we came upon Peepaldada, a hamlet of six hundred people clinging to a hillside overlooking a fertile valley. Ten months after the earthquake, most of the population was still living beneath tarpaulins. “The winter was very difficult for us,” a toothless old man told me. Some had built crude structures using the rubble from their destroyed homes; the neediest had received iron frames from the volunteer group, which they had lined with corrugated tin walls and covered with a tin roof. The only assistance they had received from the government was 10,000 rupees in emergency relief just after the earthquake ($100), 15,000 rupees received in December to get them through the winter, and eight pieces of corrugated tin.

Khatiwada, the volunteer coordinator, told me that during the last few weeks the government’s paralysis had begun to ease. The Reconstruction Authority had dispatched teams into the hills to assess damage and had announced a payment of 200,000 rupees to each homeless family. It had also pledged to guarantee loans of up to 2.5 million rupees per family so that they could complete construction of their new houses. Payment was contingent upon the families’ choosing from one of fifteen different earthquake-resistant designs formulated by structural Ismael Ferdous/Redux

who had worked in the Gorkha regiments in the Indian army.

Armed training also came from another source—Indian Maoists, waging a war against the Indian state. Nepal’s Maoist commanders were to visit camps in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh to learn from their comrades across the border.

The New York Review

GALLERIESANDMUSEUMS A CURRENT LISTING John Davis Gallery, 362½ Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534; (518) 828-5907; art@johndavis gallery.com; www.johndavisgallery .com. Thursday–Monday, 11am–5pm.

"Maria Walker: Compass": Maria Walker makes three-dimensional paintings that push the basic materials of wood, canvas, and paint to balance the straightforward physicality and profundity of what a painting object is. Walker mines the space within a painting, between one’s self and the painting, and the space between one painting and the next to bring the viewer and painting into a shared, dynamic present.

Shepherd / W & K Galleries, 58 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075; (212) 861-4050; Fax: (212) 772-1314; shepherdny @aol.com; www.shepherd gallery.com. Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–6pm. March 29–June 11, 2016: "The Human Form: Works from The Gallery Collection." The recently acquired lime-wood, life-size sculpture of Max Klinger, Seated Youth (Study for the An Academic Male Nude in ConJudgement of Paris), 1883–1887 trapposto Pose (1783) by Franz Xaver Seegen (1723–1789) has inspired this exhibition of works depicting the human form. The sculpture is accompanied by drawings and oil sketches demonstrating how various artists studied particular areas of the body or the positioning of the model. This method formed the basis of the academic tradition. Included are works by Burne-Jones, Etty, Klinger, Legros, Leighton, Moore, Mancini, Poynter, Puvis de Chavannes, Rops, and others.

Atlantic Gallery: Phyllis Chillingworth.

548 West 28th Street, Suite 540, New York, NY 10001. (212) 219-3183. info@ atlanticgallery.org; Tuesday–Saturday: 12pm–6pm.

Thursdays: 12pm–9pm.

May 17–June 11, 2016: "Currents" is an exhibition of oil paintings by Phyllis Chillingworth. These paintings capture the rhythms and impressions from her recent travels to Nova Scotia, Cape Cod, and Montana. To learn more about the artist visit www.phyllischillingworth .com. She earned a BS from The Institute of Design, IIT, Chicago and a BFA/MFA from The Yale School of Art & Architecture.

Atlantic Gallery: Meera Thompson. 548 West 28th Street, Suite 540, New York, NY 10001. (212) 219-3183. info@ atlanticgallery.org; Tuesday– Saturday: 12pm–6pm. Thursdays: 12pm–9pm. May 17–June 11, 2016: "Meera Thompson: Weathering Whether." Thompson’s sensuous paintings offer a meditation on the mutability of Meera Thompson, Scherzo, 2015, gouache and watercolor on handmade cotton the passing moment.

Judy Ferrara Gallery, 16 S. Elm Street, Three Oaks, MI 49128; (574) 276-6001; www.judyferraragallery.com. Thursday– Monday, 12pm–5pm. Brooks Cashbaugh, a 2010 fine arts graduate from Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, grew up in Elkhart, IN and currently resides in NYC. Cashbaugh describes his work best: “Using a keyed-up CMYK palette, I paint with an energetic mark that seeks to rediscover the excitement of creating a hand-made image that can sit comfortably with the digital and photographic images that prevail in our era.” Call or e-mail Judy for information or to request images at (574) 276-6001 or judyferrara@gmail.com.

Weinberger Fine Art, 114 SW Boulevard Kansas City, MO 64108; (816) 301-4428; www.weinbergerfineart.com; kim@weinbergerfineart.com. Tuesday–Friday, 10am–6pm and Saturday, 12–5pm. May 5 through June 25: "Hunt Slonem: Work from the Artist’s Studio." Located in Kansas City’s Creative Crossroads Arts District, Weinberger Fine Art is committed to showcasing diverse and high-quality work from both emerging and internationally established artists. Please join us for a VIP Cocktail Reception and Book Signing on May 5, 5–8pm.

Tickets may be purchased online at weinbergerfineart.com.

Maria Walker, Untitled (Red and Green), 2013, acrylic, unprimed linen, wood, 18 x 18 x 1.5 in.

Phyllis Chillingworth, Mt Katahdin, Maine, oil on linen, 26 x 32 in.

Brooks Cashbaugh, Our Lady the Convert, acrylic, paint marker, archival spray paint on canvas, 84 x 60 in.

May 12, 2016

Lincoln (orange), 20 x 16 in., $9,000

Alexandre Gallery has moved to a new space at 724 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10019; (212) 7552828; inquiries@alexandregallery.com, www.alexandregallery.com.

April 14 through May 27: "Will Barnet: 1950s on Paper."

The Drawing Room, 66 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937; (631) 3245016, info@drawingroom-gallery .com, www.drawingroom-gallery.com.

PLEASE NOTE OUR NEW HOURS: Monday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday 10am– 5pm; Sunday, 11am–5pm. From May 13 through June 20, the gallery will present concurrent exhibitions: "Toni Ross New Sculpture" and "Artists in the Field: Irene Kopelman, Pat Pickett, Alexis Rockman."

Toni Ross explores surface and structure in recent stoneware sculptures that evoke asToni Ross, sociations spanning from ancient archaeoStoneware Sculpture, 2016 logical relics to icons of Modernism. "Artists in the Field" highlights three contemporary artists whose practices address the fragility and tenacity of particular ecosystems around the globe through direct engagement with often extreme natural environments.

Swann Auction Galleries, 104 East 25th Street, New York, NY 10010; (212) 254-4710; swann galleries.com.

Upcoming Auction: American Art, June 9; Preview: June 4 through June 9. This annual auction features works by a wide range of American artists including Charles Burchfield, Paul Cadmus, Walt Kuhn, John Marin, Abraham Walkowitz, and Guy C. Wiggins, among others. Featured in this year's sale is Mexican painter and illustrator Miguel Covarrubias's At LeRoy's. This drawing, pictured, was illustrated in the artist's 1927 book Negro Drawings, depicting his perceptions of the Harlem Renaissance.

QCC Art Gallery/CUNY, 222-05 56 Avenue, Bayside, NY 11364; www.qcc artgallery.org. "Spirit & Tradition: Vessels from Africa." Select works from the Dr. Ayman El-Mohandes Collection. "Spirit & Tradition" explores the fluidity and diversity of one the oldest forms of art: pottery. The exhibition will invite audiences to become acquainted with the techniques used to create traditional ceramic vessels, and their purposes within specific African cultures. The exhibition will be on view from May 10 through June 12, 2016.

Will Barnet, Untitled, c. 1954–1959, mixed media on paper, 5 1/2 x 3 1/4 in.

Miguel Covarrubias, At LeRoys, watercolor, pen and ink, c. 1924.

Estimate $30,000 to $50,000.

paper, 30 x 22 in.

Bamana, Mali, Ceremonial Vessel, mid-20th century, clay, 18 x 16 in.

Stephen Dubov, What Art/Why Art Shrine for Gertrude Stein's "What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them" and "Composition as Explanation," ceramics, 54 x 25 x 25 in.

Bookshrines: Reliquaries/Cumdachs to the authors who shaped the 20th-century art world. www.bookshrines.com; (512) 385-1115. Each one-of-a-kind ceramic container holds a first edition that was revolutionary, disturbing, and thought provoking. The shrines to date are to Arendt, Beardsley, Benjamin, Danto, Greenberg, Heidegger, Langer, Panofsky, Sontag, and Stein. They are homages to timeless ideas that were elegantly stated—ideas that still shape our cultural tastes and values far beyond their limited exposure. Stephen Dubov, a septuagenarian sculptor, seeks a bibliophile patron/friend/collector/representation to continue the work. Contact: steve@atelier3-d.com.

American Painting Fine Art, 5118 MacArthur Blvd., NW, Washington, DC 20016; (202) 244-3244; www .classicamericanpainting.com.

Wednesday–Saturday, 11am– 7pm and by appointment. Our gallery is dedicated to the finest work in landscape, still life, genre, urban, and marine art by current traditional American painters, many with national reputations, David Baise, Williamsburg Bridge, including recent works by Andrei watercolor, 11 x 14 in.

Kushnir (Landscape and Marine), Michele Martin Taylor (Post-Impressionist), David Baise (NYC Watercolors), Carol Spils (Archetypal), Michael Francis (Urban Landscape), and Ross Merrill (Eastern Shore, Western Landscape). Current Exhibition: “Gallery Selections,” recent works by gallery artists.

J. Alden Weir, The Spring House, Windham, c. 1910–1919 Estate of William B. Carlin

Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 625 Williams Street, New London, CT 06320; (860) 443-2545; www.lymanallyn.org. May 7– September 11, 2016: "A Good Summer’s Work: J. Alden Weir, Connecticut Impressionist" will focus on paintings created in eastern Connecticut by J. Alden Weir and others in his circle, including Childe Hassam, Emil Carlsen, and John Singer Sargent. Bringing together for the first time more than forty works from museums and private collections across the country, the exhibition considers the unique inspiration that American Impressionists drew from the eastern Connecticut landscape.

"Hearsay—Artists Reveal Urban Legends."

LosJoCos Gallery, 725 Kohler St., Los Angeles, CA 90021; (213) 814-7164; May 13– June 12, Thursday–Friday, 4–7pm and Saturday–Sunday, 2–7pm; artists’ reception May 13, 7–10pm.

Including works by Llynn Foulkes, Robert Williams, Jeff Gillette, Jim Shaw, Marnie Weber, etc. Presented by the Arts District Center for the Robert Williams, While Traveling Near or Arts, opening later in the year at Traveling Far, Keep Your Hands Inside One Santa Fe, the ADCA will serve the Car!, 1990, print, 18 x 20 in. the Arts District and downtown Los Angeles with a gallery, screening room, and theater workshop space, creating opportunities for LA artists to connect with audiences and offering original programming that challenges the traditional boundaries. The ADCA—keeping it weird in LA! More at ladadspace.org.

GALLERIES ANDMUSEUMS A CURRENT LISTING To advertise a gallery or museum exhibition in The New York Review ’s Galleries & Museums Listing, contact gallery@nybooks.com or (212) 293-1630.

49

engineers. The government had pledged to build 600,000 houses in the next year, but Khatiwada told me that that goal was unreachable. “It will be more like five years,” he told me.

As the reconstruction effort staggers forward, millions of earthquake survivors in the hills face another monsoon season without suitable shelter.

And a reprise of the Madhesi blockade—which would set the recovery

back further—remains a possibility.

Nepal’s new prime minister, K. P. Oli, a former Communist rebel in the 1970s who served a total of fourteen years in prison for beheading landlords in an eastern district, has shown little affinity for the Madhesis. He has reportedly disparaged them as “Biharis,” and angered Indian Prime Minister Modi during a recent meeting in New Delhi by opposing the creation of new prov-

inces that would give the Madhesis a bigger stake in governance. I was told that Prime Minister Oli has close connections to timber and construction interests in one district in the plains near India, and has been unwilling to split the district from his hill province to placate the Madhesi.

As if that weren’t enough to cause concern in Nepal, new data published in the journals Nature Geoscience

and Science suggested that the April 2015 earthquake failed to release all the stress along the Great Himalayan Thrust. According to geologists, the next rupture is likely to take place near the resort town of Pokhara, one hundred miles west of Kathmandu. The last earthquake there, in 1505, exceeded 8.5 on the Richter scale. The next is said by experts to be long overdue.

—April 13, 2016

‘Beautiful and Horrible’ Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems

by Robin Coste Lewis.

Knopf, 142 pp., $26.00 A startling shift in perspective occurs as we read—and remains with us after we have read—the title poem in Robin Coste Lewis’s first collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, which received the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry. The poem is an incantatory compilation of the names of art works, catalog entries, and scholarly texts describing “Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present.” Lewis’s ambitious narrative poem is itself a kind of catalog that alters the way we see and think about a wide range of visual art. It affects our view of the historical, political, and cultural climate in which that art was created, collected, exhibited, and preserved.

In a prologue, Lewis explains the guidelines that determined her principles of selection of art objects portraying black women and the process of composition. The titles of the works were to remain intact and unaltered, though the grammar and punctuation of the names and the texts were modified: “I erased all periods, commas, semicolons.” The following passage illustrates how the poem’s idiosyncratic orthography increases its music, wit, and mystery, even as the reader may succumb to the temptation to reassemble, for greater clarity, the fragments of language: Anyonymous speaking at memorial for Four Negro Girls killed in church bombing in Birming. Ham. President Kennedy addressing the crowd: A Red Boo! A Negro Boo! Young Girls being held in a prison cell at the Leesburg Stockade. Wounded, civil.

Rights demonstrators in the hospital and on the street- burned- out- bus: Bronzeville Inn Cabins for Coloreds. Here lies Jim Crow drink Coca- Cola white.

Customers Only!

In compiling her list, Lewis tells us, she broadened the definition of art be50

yond the categories of painting, sculpture, and photography that are customarily employed by art historians. That definition is expanded here to include objects—“combs, spoons, buckles, pans, knives, table legs”— that incorporate the figures of black females as design elements. She has included black women who passed for white, and, in some cases, has chosen to use a museum’s description of a work rather than its title.

Lewis makes a cogent case for her use of black rather than African-American:

Eudora Welty, LLC

Francine Prose

Just under eighty pages long,

“Voyage of the Sable Venus” begins with two epigraphs that together exemplify—and provide a preview of—Lewis’s insistence on letting historical documents speak for themselves and her fondness for juxtaposing passages of profound horror with examples of institutional racism so benighted that they might almost seem comical, were they not so distasteful. The second of these epigraphs is a request from a Mrs. B. L. Blankenship, an antebellum Virginian: “I am anxious to buy a small healthy negro girl—ten or twelve years old, and would like to know if you can let me have one . . .” The first, particularly apt for a work that addresses the subjects of curatorial practice, art history, and museum display, is a party announcement:

At some point, I realized that museums and libraries (in what I imagine must have been either a hard-won gesture of goodwill, or in order not to appear irrelevant) had removed many nineteenthcentury historically specific markers—such as slave, The Metropolitan Museum colored, and Negro—from of Art their titles or archives, and Employee’s Association replaced these words inMinstrel Show and Dance stead with the sanitized, will be held at the American but perhaps equally vapid, Woman’s Association African-American. In order 361 West 57th Street, Saturto replace this historical day evening, erasure of slavery (however October 17, 1936 well intended), I re- erased the postmodern AfricanThe poem is divided into American, then changed ‘Window Shopping,’ circa 1930s; photograph by Eudora Welty sections arranged in roughly those titles back. That is, I chronological order, beginning re- corrected the corrected with Ancient Greece, Rome, horror in order to allow that Heraldic Lion Holding and Egypt, and ending in the modern original horror to stand. My intent Between His Paws the Head era. A list of damaged objects from was to explore and record not only classical antiquity comes to seem like the history of human thought, but of a Kneeling Black Captive a roster of injuries sustained by human also how normative and complicit Statuette of a Negro Captive victims: artists, curators, and art instituKneeling tions have been in participating Statuette of a Women Reduced in—if not creating—this history.

Hands Bound Behind Back to the Shape of a Flat Paddle Negro Youth Struggling In addition, Lewis “decided to inStatuette of a Black Slave Girl clude titles of art by black women with a Crocodile Negro Right Half of Body and Head curators and artists, whether the art Youth Struggling with a Crocodile Missing . . . included a black female figure or not” and “work by black queer artists, reNegro Youth Struggling Figure’s Left Arm Missing Head gardless of gender, because this body of with a Crocodile Pygmy of a Female-Full- length Figure work has made consistently some of the richest, most elegant, least pretentious Armed with a Stick Statuette of a Nubian Woman contributions to Western art interrogaof a Black Girl with Her Head the Arms Missing . . . tions of gender and race.”

“Finally,” she writes, “with one exInclined Toward the Left Partially Broken Young Black ception, no title was repeated,” an exShoulder Dagger with Decoration Girl planation that clarifies passages such Presenting a Stemmed Bowl as the one below. It is helpful (and disIn Relief Lion Devouring a Black maying) to learn that an object is not Head Supported unique but belongs to a larger group of of a Black Nude Black Serving by a Monkey works employing similar imagery: Girl The New York Review

Unsurprisingly, the most distressing verses are lists of works made during (or portraying) the period of the Middle Passage. Powerfully evocative, easy to picture despite the brevity with which they are described, the images ip past us: slavers throwing the dead and dying off a slave ship; an auction at which a “Negro Man in Loincloth/serves liquor to Men Bidding/on The Slaves while A Slave Woman/attends Two Women Observing The Saleâ€?; “Two Black Overseers/Flogging Two Negro Slaves/One a Nude Man Suspended from a Tree/ The Other a Woman.â€?

The most chilling sections read like logs of evidence with line breaks; they are incontrovertible proof of the violence that occurred during a shameful era in our history: In a Grove of Trees Slave Woman wearing a Runaway.

Collar with Two Children, emaciated.

Negro Man eating Dead.

Horseesh in the background.

Negro Man strapped to a ladder, Being.

Lashed Slave Woman seen from the back, her head in left proďŹ le, kneading bread and smoking a Pipe Parrot Vendor Negress.

Carrying Her Young Slave Woman carrying Baby and Negro Boy, running.

At Left Negro Man at right, Being.

Held by the collar, two dogs wear collars, one labeled “Cass,� the other: “Expounder.�

Amid these litanies of misery and

pain is a description of an image that readers might register as a temporary lightening of the mood, an example of racist kitsch that stands, in contrast to the oggings and murders, much as the announcement of the Metropolitan Museum’s blackface ball follows the politesse and brutality of Mrs. Blankenship’s inquiry regarding the purchase of a child: Nude Black Woman in an Oyster Shell Drawn by Dolphins through the Water and accompanied by Cupids, Neptune, and Others.

These lines describe Thomas Stothard’s etching The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies, an odious representation of a nearnaked black woman awkwardly posed on a shell balanced on the backs of two ill-tempered dolphins and surrounded by acrobatic, plumed white cupids and a buff, sinewy Neptune. This image accompanied the third edition of Bryan Edwards’s The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1801), a volume that contained Isaac Teale’s long poem “The Sable Venus: An Ode.�

The most- often- quoted verse of Teale’s rambling, wretched work re-

assures the erotic adventurer seeking “fond pleasure . . . ready joys . . . and all true raptures� that, in the dark, a black female body is no different from the pale goddess at the center of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. What makes the picture and the poem repellent is not merely the crudeness of sentiment and expression, but the fact that they were composed when black women, far from being ferried by dolphins and venerated as deities, were regularly chained and transported in the holds of cargo ships.

However familiar we may be with the history of slavery, we’re freshly astonished and appalled by the realities to which these disturbing images testify: by and large (with the obvious exception of the black Venus), they were not works of the imagination; an artist might have witnessed such scenes or heard about them from an eyewitness; and such pictures could have been considered suitable for the decoration of homes.

It is to Lewis’s credit that she never denies, ignores, or underestimates the complexities and contradictions of her subject matter. One such contradiction confronts us even before we open the ďŹ rst page of her attractive, elegantly designed volume. Taken from one of history’s most degrading visions of a black female, the collection’s title shares the book’s cover with Window Shopping, Eudora Welty’s lovely photograph, printed here in sepia tones: a remarkably different depiction by a white artist of a black woman looking into a store window. Though the photo was taken in the 1930s, in Jim Crow Mississippi, it transcends the preconceptions

and prejudices of that time and place.

It’s hard not to see it as a loving homage to its subject’s beauty, grace, dignity, self-possession, and sense of style; and, in addition, as a study of the contemplative reverie into which any of us, of any color, can slip as we stand in front of a store window.

The latter sections of the poem move briskly through more recent centuries and into the present. Abraham Lincoln makes an appearance, “holding/a Kneeling Black Woman/by the wrist/ and lifting Her/to Her Feet.� The ceremonial solemnity of this vision and its implicit promise of a more egalitarian future is instantly undercut by the images that follow: three children, one white, one red, one black, are being held in the arms of Charity, while a Chinese person holds Charity’s drapery. A black man and a white man, “His Arm/Around a Small Negro Girl,� shake hands inside a wreath of sugar cane stems.

As we move into the modern era, the

tone of the poem becomes less harrowing and turns lively, even joyous.

Presumably, this is because many of the images in Lewis’s poem have been created by black artists whose works express a more informed, thoughtful, sympathetic, and celebratory view of black women, as well as an understandably different and frequently angry or wry perspective on race relations.

Lewis is generous and respectful in her appreciation of the scores of writers and visual artists responsible for dispelling the stereotypes and misconceptions so prevalent in the past. Among the

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Rulers such as Basil the Great of Onessa, who founded the Empire but whose treacherous ways made him a byword for infamy, and the romantic Alexis the bastard, who dallied in the fleshpots of Egypt, studied Taoism and Buddhism, returned to save the Empire from civil war, and then retired “to learn to die,” come alive in The Glory of the Empire, along with generals, politicians, prophets, scoundrels, and others. Jean d’Ormesson also goes into the daily life of the Empire, its popular customs, and its contribution to the arts and the sciences, which, as he demonstrates, exercised an influence on the world as a whole, from the East to the West, and whose repercussions are still felt today.

But it is all fiction, a thought experiment worthy of Jorge Luis Borges, and in the end The Glory of the Empire emerges as a great shimmering mirage, filling us with wonder even as it makes us wonder at the fugitive nature of power and the meaning of history itself.

“D’Ormesson provides witty fictional documentation, parodies opinions of historians and literati (there is a one-line parody of Walt Whitman), borrows outrageously and has caught brilliantly the ‘Where is Nineveh now?’ tone of sunset reflection.

A tour de force.” —Kirkus Reviews

THE GLORY OF THE EMPIRE A NOVEL, A HISTORY Jean D’Ormesson Introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn Translated from the French by Barbara Bray Paperback and e-book On sale May 3rd

Lewis’s

Monday, May 23rd, 7pm Albertine Bookstore 972 Fifth Avenue (at 79th Street) New York City www.albertine.com Daniel Mendelsohn and Anka Muhlstein will be discussing Jean d’Ormesson’s novel The Glory of the Empire.

engagement with complication and contradiction is equally evident in the two groups of autobiographical poems that surround “Voyage of the Sable Venus.” The first and last poems in the collection touch on the ramifications of knowing that one’s ancestors were slave- owning blacks, a population that Edward P. Jones wrote

Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500,

*Charles Reznikoff, Testimony: The United States (1885–1915): Recitative, with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger (Godine, 2015), reviewed by Charles Simic in “A Brutal American Epic,” NYR Daily, August 25, 2015.

or visit www.nyrb.com

52

works she mentions are The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a collaboration between Langston Hughes and the photographer Roy DeCarava; Lynn MarshallLinnemaeir’s “Annotated Topsy series”; a painting by the vernacular artist Nellie Mae Rowe; a photograph by Carrie Mae Weems with a caption that reads, “looking into the mirror/the Black Woman asked/‘Mirror, Mirror on the wall,/who’s the finest of them all?’/The Mirror says,/‘Snow White/ you Black Bitch,/and don’t you forget it’”; and a Kara Walker installation entitled “‘They waz Nice/White Folks// While They/Lasted’//(Says One Gal/to Another.)”

What has mattered since the Dadaists first experimented with found poetry—verse pieced together from scraps of spoken and written language, from texts not originally intended to be literary or poetic—is what matters still: the artfulness with which the poet fashions this sort of collage. At moments Voyage of the Sable Venus may remind one of how, in Testimony: The United States (1885–1915): Recitative, Charles Reznikoff demonstrated (as Charles Simic noted in the NYR Daily*) that a rich vein of poetry can be mined from documents as ordinary and unpolished as court trial transcripts; a section of Reznikoff’s poem entitled “Whites and Blacks” portrays race relations fully as fractious and oppressive as the inequities and injustices that fuel the anger underlying much of Lewis’s work.

The success of the effects that the poet achieves with the raw material on hand is what distinguishes work like Reznikoff’s and Lewis’s from so-called conceptual poetry, whose practitioners (among them Kenneth Goldsmith) argue, less convincingly, that a poem can be made by arranging nonsense syllables, or by obsessively recording every tiny gesture made during a day of the poet’s life, or by simply retyping a page from a newspaper.

Lewis’s focus on the language in which the images are described rather than on the images themselves concentrates our attention and makes it easier to grasp the themes and patterns that emerge. As we read this unillustrated catalog, information reaches us in short, telegraphic bursts, without the distractions of detail, or color, or composition, without inciting or satisfying the desire to walk around a sculpture or to spend the length of time required to fully experience a painting. But many readers will want to see the works to which Lewis refers—beginning with the image from which the collection takes its title. They may find themselves finishing the poem and heading for a museum or an art library or, more likely, consulting the Internet.

about beautifully and perceptively in his novel The Known World (2003).

Both the opening and the final poems include the words “the black side of my family owned slaves,” and both explore the grief and shame of having made this discovery:

lying at their feet. Several of them are pointing up, apparently in the direction from which they believe the assassin has fired his gun.

Our textbooks stuttered over the same four pictures every year: that girl in the foreground, on the balcony; black loafers, white bobby socks, black skirt, black cardigan, white collar. Her hand pointing. The others—all men—looking so smart, shirt- and- tied, like the gentle men on my street, pointing

Tonight, after twenty- five years, I realized I’ve spent my entire life avoiding any situation that might require me to say these words aloud.

Some of the most memorable passages in these shorter lyrics make reference to visual art, as if Lewis’s fascination with the implications of a graphic image had been allowed to spill beyond the strict parameters that govCarrie Mae Weems/Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

A rich and and absorbing history of an extraordinary empire, at one point a rival to Rome.

Carrie Mae Weems: Mirror Mirror, 1987– 2012. A book devoted to her Kitchen Table Series (1990) has just been published by Damiani/Matsumoto Editions, with essays

by Sarah Lewis and Adrienne Edwards.

ern the composition of “Voyage of the Sable Venus.” The poem “From: To:” considers the new and heady experience of freedom enjoyed by black infantry soldiers serving in World War II, men who, in a photograph, have gathered around a bomb on whose casing they have scrawled a personal message: At last, a dark murderous lunatic to whom they are allowed to respond.

Here, no one expects them to be strung up by their necks—dangled—and then left to be cut down from a tall tree— and not cry . . . . . .They find some chalk to celebrate. While one loads, one lifts, then checks. Just before they ignite the bomb, they write on its shell— FROM HARLEM, TO HITLER — then stand back for the camera, smiling.

The poem “Frame” begins with memories of childhood (Lewis was born in Compton, California, and her family is from New Orleans) and includes, near its end, an image that, as Lewis describes it, floats into our minds like a photograph coming up in a tray of developing fluid. It’s Joseph Louw’s well-known photograph of a small group of people on the balcony on which the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. has just been murdered and is

as well, toward the air— the blank page, the well-worn hollow space— from which the answer was always the same hoary thud.

Every year these four photographs taught us how English was really a type of trick math: like the naked Emperor, you could be a King capable of imagining just one single dream; or there could be a body, bloody at your feet—then you could point at the sky; or you could be a hunched- over cotton-picking shame; or you could swing from a tree by your neck into the frame.

Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems changes the manner in which we read the texts on museum walls, in galleries, and in art books—with sharpened attention but happily (thanks to Lewis’s wit, the ingeniousness of her method, and the complexity of her perspective) without the sense of grievance or the harsh, censorious judgment that might spoil our appreciation of the works on display. Underlying Lewis’s critique, one intuits, is a frank acknowledgment of the seductiveness of aesthetic pleasure, of the power of beauty, in almost every case, to trump our moral reservations about the settings in which the beautiful objects were created. In an interview, Lewis has said of the image of The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies, “It’s really horrible. It’s beautiful and horrible simultaneously.”

When we are in their presence, the gorgeous, fragmented statues from Egypt and classical antiquity don’t in fact remind us of the physical damage suffered by the black women they represent. Lewis’s book doesn’t diminish our enjoyment of art but rather enhances it by encouraging us to formulate a more conscious way of thinking about what we are seeing.

Among the virtues of the collection is the intensity of Lewis’s faith in the power of language and image to tell us things that are true, but that are rarely said, about history, race, gender, power, the body, scholarship, and visual representation. In providing us with a revelatory gloss on centuries of art, Robin Coste Lewis has made us aware of the enormity of the change reflected and perhaps partly brought about by contemporary black women artists whose vision, originality, and humor offer a heartening corrective to the ghastly insult of the Sable Venus.

The New York Review

Which Matisse Do You Choose?

Jed Perl Frances and Michael Baylson/Graham S. Haber

Matisse in the Barnes Foundation edited by Yve-Alain Bois.

Thames and Hudson/The Barnes Foundation, 3 vols., 894 pp., $350.00 Graphic Passion: Matisse and the Book Arts an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, October 30, 2015–January 18, 2016.

Catalog of the exhibition by John Bidwell and others.

Morgan Library and Museum/ Pennsylvania State University Press, 272 pp., $65.00 Ellsworth Kelly: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Reliefs, and Sculpture, Volume 1, 1940–1953

by Yve-Alain Bois.

Paris: Cahiers d’Art, 383 pp., $395.00 The search for patterns, root causes, and overarching forces is universal, shaping thought about the visual arts as it does every other field of inquiry.

But there are times when this search, admirable and essential as it is, can blind us to the powerful part that less predictable forces play in artistic creation: vagrant thoughts, backward or sideways glances, accidents, coincidences, escapades, obsessions, misreadings, even outright mistakes. Of all the modern masters, Matisse was the one whose art and life were most complexly shaped by the dynamic interaction between large patterns and unpredictable particulars. The arguments about what made Matisse the artist he was—what made Matisse Matisse—began more than a century ago with his emergence as the king of the Fauves, by some measure the most adventurous colorist in the history of art, and have never really been resolved. Sometimes he himself seemed unsure of who or what he was.

The publication of Matisse in the Barnes Foundation—a three-volume catalog of one of the greatest collections of his work, produced under the supervision of Yve-Alain Bois, a prominent figure among art historians—provides a fine occasion to return to these questions. This considerable achievement ought not be viewed in isolation, for Matisse is almost always in the public eye. Less than a year after the immense exhibition of his cutouts closed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in February 2015, the Morgan Library and Museum mounted an important show, “Graphic Passion: Matisse and the Book Arts,” focusing on an essential and too often overlooked aspect of his achievement.

Every decade brings fresh approaches to Matisse, a notable book of recent years being Henri Matisse: Modernist Against the Grain, by Catherine Bock-Weiss.1 And if we are to take the measure of Yve-Alain Bois’s views of modern art, it helps to look not only at his earlier work on Matisse, particularly the essay “Matisse and ‘Arche- drawing’” in his 1990 book Painting as Model, but also at the first 1

Penn State University Press, 2009.

May 12, 2016

Henri Matisse: Icarus, plate VIII in his book Jazz, 1947; from the Morgan Library and Museum’s recent exhibition ‘Graphic Passion: Matisse and the Book Arts’

volume of the catalogue raisonné of Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings, reliefs, and sculptures, which appeared last fall. Kelly, who died in December at the age of ninety-two, is often viewed as the inheritor of Matisse’s coloristic gifts, and for the catalogue raisonné Bois has written an extensive series of commentaries on the work Kelly did in France, where he lived between 1948 and 1954.

Among

the works in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia are more than fifty paintings by Matisse, including major achievements from nearly every period of his career. Albert Barnes, a chemist who made a fortune in the pharmaceutical industry, did not begin collecting Matisse as early as the Russian Sergei Shchukin or Gertrude and Leo Stein and their brother Michael and his wife Sarah.

But once he did so in 1912 Barnes was unstoppable, acquiring from the Steins important works, including the boisterous pastoral Le Bonheur de vivre, and commissioning from Matisse in 1930 his first major mural, The Dance. The Barnes collection ranges from daringly distilled works of the pre–World War I period, including Red Madras Headdress and Seated Riffian, through

some of the richly articulated nudes of the 1920s, down to a couple of the rapidly painted interiors of 1947, which are among Matisse’s last and in many respects still least studied and admired paintings. Barnes, who saw the function of his foundation as largely educational, published in 1933 one of the first major books on Matisse, written with Violette de Mazia, his close collaborator at the foundation.

Yve-Alain Bois has shaped and directed the Barnes’s multivolume Matisse catalog, while limiting his own writing in it to a long essay, “Matisse’s Awakening,” and leaving the extensive entries on the paintings to Karen K. Butler and Claudine Grammont. In “Matisse’s Awakening” Bois focuses on The Dance, the mural that fills the arched spaces above the three windows in the foundation’s main gallery. This is by any measure a major achievement. There are two versions, the first of which is now in Paris, because a serious miscalculation of the size of the space forced Matisse to begin anew after more than a year’s labor.

In working out the enormous composition, Matisse resorted to cutting and manipulating sheets of painted paper, so that the mural became a prelude to the cut-paper compositions of his last years, which many regard as his defini-

tive rejection of the constraints of oldfashioned easel painting.

In the Barnes Dance, with its eight female figures, the Dionysiac heat of the circles of dancers Matisse had created more than twenty years earlier (in Le Bonheur de vivre and what is known as Dance II (1909–1910), commissioned by Shchukin for his Moscow mansion) are recapitulated and transformed, imbued with a dramatically different accent and timbre. The vehement red, green, and blue of Shchukin’s Dance II give way at the Barnes to a cooler, almost chilly orchestration of black, gray, gray-blue, and dusky pink.

The linear arabesques now have a less tightly wound, less spring-like power.

The figures are heavier, slowed down.

The Barnes Dance is a recollection or memorialization of a dance.

Longtime admirers of Yve-Alain Bois will not be surprised that he has focused on The Dance, with little or nothing to say about the many paintings in the Barnes collection that date from the end of World War I to the early 1930s. They include studies in subtle visual complication and idiosyncratic naturalism such as The Venetian Blinds (1919), Young Woman Before an Aquarium (1921–1922), and Moorish Woman (1922–1923). Bois is quite frank about there being a Matisse who engages him very deeply and a Matisse who engages him far less. He favors the Matisse who simplifies and reduces, who aims for broad, succinct effects.

What interests him is the Matisse he refers to as “the great innovator of the prewar years.”

As for the “other” Matisse—the Matisse who cultivates labyrinthine spatial ambiguities and intricate layerings of patterns and colors—Bois sympathizes with those critics who long ago “cast doubt” on his “inventiveness.” While careful to not exactly dismiss any phase of Matisse’s achievement, Bois makes it clear that he prefers Matisse when he is operating with what he says “could be called a ‘system,’ a coherent set of principles that were codependent and that governed his entire production.” Bois sees the more naturalistic Matisse of the post– World War I decade as unsystematic.

And he applauds what he describes as a return in the Barnes mural to a system with color “at its core,” although of course naturalism has its own forms of systemization, which apparently interest Bois less.

While there is nothing exactly crude or peremptory in Bois’s division of Matisse’s work, I think he is much too willing to impose his own system of values on the artist. His preferences put him in good company, for there is a long history of critics attempting to shoehorn the infinitely variable Matisse into some particular set of values. Bois makes much of a 1930 essay, “Henri Matisse at Sixty,” by the Russian-born critic André Levinson, a figure still revered in the dance world for his appreciations of early modern ballet. In “Henri Matisse at Sixty,” Levinson was already arguing that there were two Matisses. He believed there was “a discontinuity between the two,” and that “the second had neglected, evaded, 53

H

owever one judges Matisse’s achievement, nobody can gainsay its multitudinous nature. In Henri Matisse: Modernist Against the Grain, Catherine Bock-Weiss characterizes his output as “varied, uneven, and to a large extent incoherent in style and media,” and speaks of the “brilliant and fractured patterns” in his life and work. My sense is that Bock-Weiss is excited by these complications, which seem to her to underscore the inadequacy “of our received notion of modernism, our overdetermined and prescriptive notion of which art merits the title ‘modernist.’” She devotes an entire chapter to André Levinson’s essay on the two Matisses.

Even Clement Greenberg, a critic always eager to engage the central issue and clarify a situation, was impressed by Matisse’s magisterial ambiguities. In a little book about Matisse published in 1953, Greenberg comments that the artist “has never been able to come to rest in any one solution.” He argues that the fact “that Matisse strove for serenity and at times condescended to elegance and erotic charm ought not to deceive us as to the doubts underneath.” These observations are hardly disinterested.

For Greenberg, Matisse’s “doubts” and “questioning” are somehow to be celebrated, whereas “serenity,” “elegance,” and “erotic charm” are more of a problem. Greenberg aims to resolve this dilemma, observing that “in this constant questioning of his own work . . .we recognize the type of the great modern artist.” But the exploration that leads to “elegance” and “erotic charm” is not the sort of search that generally holds Greenberg’s attention.

Behind all the talk about Matisse’s divided self—whether from Levinson, Greenberg, or Bois—looms a larger question, about the nature of artistic evolution. When Greenberg, in 1957, wrote that “like any other real style, Cubism had its own inherent laws of development,” or Bois, in his essay “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” included in Painting as Model, speaks of “the task that historically belonged to modern painting (that, precisely, of working through the end of painting),” they are embracing—and in Bois’s case simultaneously contending with—what Isaiah Berlin described as the perils of “historical inevitability.” Certain of Matisse’s works—the Fauve landscapes, The Red 54

Studio (1911), the Shchukin and Barnes Dances, and the final paper cutouts— are seen by many of his admirers as fulfilling a historical imperative. They are not so much individual statements as they are contributions to a larger historical drama, involving the steady, inevitable dissolution of the self-enclosed, illusionistic world of easel painting.

For those who embrace this evolutionary model, much of Matisse’s work of the 1920s can appear reactionary, as if the artist were taking a stand against art’s inevitable forward flow. Matisse, by this logic, was rejecting precisely what Berlin condemns as “impersonal or ‘trans-personal’ or ‘super-personal’ entities or ‘forces’”—and thereby revealing, at least to Bois’s way of thinking, his lack of relevance or significance.

Judged by these standards, Matisse’s

over nature of Matisse’s best works.”

The virtue of all-over painting, as Bois sees it, is that each area is accorded if not an equal then a commensurate value. This arguably “democratic” approach to composition is embraced as a rejection of older “hierarchical” systems, whereby (to give but one example) the figure of Saint Jerome is accorded more visual significance than the surrounding landscape.

It is clear why a painting such as Moorish Woman holds far less interest for Bois, rejecting as it does the all- over effect in favor of a layering and knitting-together of variegated patterns and tonalities, with the figure’s imposing head and torso having a central, stabilizing force. Bois favors those Matisse canvases that he believes are “tensed to a maximum, like the

literary friends. These images highlight gifts for naturalistic or hyperbolic characterization that some may be surprised to find coming from the hand of an artist often praised for his ability to be succinct on a grand scale.

Matisse sometimes seemed to take as much interest in the smallest rococo amusement as in the largest austere decoration. In a 1946 essay, “How I Made My Books,” he observed, “I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting, and I always proceed from the simple to the complex, yet am always ready to reconceive in simplicity.”

W

riters who believe that their preferred artistic ideas or ideals are ratified by history have a built-in rhetorical advantage. Bois’s standing among art historians has much to do with his ability to convince his colleagues that history is on his side. He has not worked alone, aligned as he is with Rosalind Krauss and others who have been important contributors to October, the scholarly journal that has consistently argued for a theoretical approach to the history of art. Back in 1996, Bois and Krauss joined forces to organize an exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris entitled “L’Informe: Mode d’emploi.” It was their riposte to Greenberg’s formalism, their declaration of the next stage in art’s evolutionary drama. In the accompanying book, published in English in 1997 as Formless: A User’s Guide, Bois began with the renegade Surrealist Georges Bataille and his interest in Manet. Bois proposed, in prose that is as aggressive as it is opaque, that modernism now be “grasped against Matisse’s first major mural, The Dance (1932–1933), commissioned by Albert Barnes in 1930 the grain,” that modernism and installed at the new Barnes Foundation museum building in Philadelphia in 2012. “start . . . shaking,” with purity reBelow are works by William James Glackens, Matisse, Picasso, and Maurice Brazil Prendergast. placed by impurity, an embrace of “the scatological dimension of base materialism,” and “a disavowal of membrane of a lung ready to explode.” development becomes a conundrum. modernist sublimation.”

But doesn’t Moorish Woman have its At times he is in the stream of history, Together with two other colleagues— own kind of tension, albeit an inwardat other times apart from it. For those Hal Foster and Benjamin H. D. turning tension? Bock-Weiss believes who want to align Matisse with the triBuchloh—Bois and Krauss produced in that Matisse’s work of the 1920s is inumph of abstraction, his last major text, 2004 a vast text, Art Since 1900, which teresting particularly for its exploration published to accompany a book of his is a catechism of their historical prefof “instinct,” for a rejection of “essenportraits, can be an embarrassment. In erences and prejudices. In an incisive tial qualities, universal values, or timethis essay he focuses on the importance critique published in The Times Literless verities,” and perhaps also for a of achieving a likeness of the sitter, and ary Supplement, the English painter search for “modernist origins,” meanpraises the verisimilitude of the Reand writer Timothy Hyman observed ing the spirit of Courbet, Renoir, and naissance masters Holbein, Dürer, and that this 704-page book presents “a Manet. And why not? Couldn’t an art Cranach. The apostle of abstraction twentieth century without, say, a Max that wound back have its own inalienends his life with an exploration of the Beckmann triptych or a Bonnard selfable virtues, as convincing in their way enigmas of appearance. portrait; where Douanier Rousseau as those of The Dance? and early Chagall both go unillustrated; Visitors to “Graphic Passion: Matisse n his studies of The Dance Bois where Balthus and Edward Hopper reand the Book Arts,” at the Morgan Lipursues themes from his earlier essay main resolutely unmentioned.” What brary and Museum, were able to explore “Matisse and ‘Arche- drawing,’” which doesn’t fit with their historical scheme precisely those ambiguous byways of focuses in part on another major work might just as well not exist.

Matisse’s imagination. While a couple at the Barnes, Le Bonheur de vivre When taste is shaped by a faith in of Matisse’s book projects—the illus(1905–1906). In the background of historical inevitability, facts tend to be trations for Mallarmé’s poems (done Matisse’s Arcadian vision there is a interpreted in particular ways, to make at the same time as the Barnes mural circle of dancers that prefigures The sure they accord with the theory. And and discussed by Bois) and the portfoDance, while the foreground is domiwhen the theory begins to pale, a new lio Jazz—have been widely admired, nated by languorous nudes, women and theory is promptly invoked, so that in the full range of his involvement with men dreaming their dreams. The arguBois’s “Painting: The Task of Mournliterary sources and the literary imagiment of “Matisse and ‘Arche- drawing’” ing” all the old talk about the death nation has been underappreciated. is that in Matisse’s greatest work the of painting is reinvigorated with a bit The Morgan exhibition was based on function of line is not so much to make of game theory, the argument being the collection of Frances and Michael form as to measure or delimit areas that modern painting, as a “specific Baylson, who have acquired not only of flat space. This leads to what Bois performance” of the game of paintMatisse’s most luxurious illustrated dubs the “quantity- quality equation,” ing, can die, while “the generic game” books, but also more casual and inwhereby the arrangement of areas of formal works, to which he occasionof painting can probably proceed. Bois color across the canvas fuels the “allally contributed vigorous portraits of performs these theoretical operations The Barnes Foundation

and tacitly disavowed the first, whose discoveries were epoch-making.”

In the capacious pages of the threevolume catalog of the Barnes Matisses there are certainly many sympathetic observations on his work of the late 1910s and 1920s, even efforts to bring together the two Matisses. In a penetrating essay on The Venetian Blinds Claudine Grammont argues, for example, that through the plangent naturalism of this radiant interior Matisse “expanded his field of visual possibilities” in ways that “prefigure the search for immateriality” in his work on the stained glass windows for the Vence Chapel at the end of the 1940s. Of course for Grammont, Matisse’s idiosyncratic realism is mostly significant as a prelude to what many regard as the more radical or experimental works he did later on.

I

The New York Review

with considerable delicacy when he is dealing with specific artists, not only in his writings on Matisse but also in his writings on Ellsworth Kelly. Although Matisse does not figure significantly in Bois’s texts for the first volume of the Ellsworth Kelly catalogue raisonné, there can be little question that Matisse’s cut-paper compositions of the late 1940s and early 1950s had a profound impact on Kelly.

K

Ellsworth Kelly Studio

elly’s work in the years around 1950 is austere and hard- edged, with enigmatic images derived through operations of chance and from fragmentary elements of cityscape or landscape. It

Bois may find it simplistic or reductionist to too closely associate Kelly’s clean-lined, stripped-down compositions with works by Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Georges Vantongerloo, Auguste Herbin, Alberto Magnelli, Max Bill, and Richard Paul Lohse. But in his insistence on opposing what he sees as Kelly’s revolt against traditional composition with a European tradition of utopian or idealist compositional strategies, Bois strikes me as missing a profound commonality, a shared sensibility. (Kelly himself, at least in his later years, wanted to dismiss or at least downgrade some of these associations, which helps clarify the artist’s embrace of Bois’s brand of art history.)

Ellsworth Kelly: Meschers, oil on canvas, August–September 1951; from the first volume of the Catalogue Raisonné

has long been known, to give but one example, that the several versions of Kelly’s painting La Combe are related to a photograph of shadows on stairs at the Villa La Combe, in the town of Meschers where he spent August 1950.

There is something moving about the preternatural powers of concentration Bois brings to his studies of this artist who means so much to him. The catalogue raisonné also happens to be one of the most beautifully produced volumes of recent years.

Writing about both Kelly and Matisse, Bois proceeds deliberately. Some readers will be left with the impression that no stone has been left unturned. But Bois turns over only the stones that serve his purpose, whether consciously or not so consciously I cannot say. He is perfectly justified in emphasizing Kelly’s interest in randomness and chance, in what he refers to as “the Ariadne’s thread of non- compositionality linking almost all the works he produced in France.” But in his haste to establish Kelly’s originality—and perhaps link Kelly’s elegantly ascetic art with his own penchant for “formlessness”—Bois downgrades, disputes, and willfully ignores the extent to which Kelly’s work was shaped by a European fascination with geometric and constructivist art that had begun in the 1920s and was flourishing after World War II. May 12, 2016

Bois, with his taste for historical imperatives, is all too insistent on establishing Kelly’s unique position as a pioneer of noncomposition or anticomposition. He cannot overlook Kelly’s friendly interactions with Jean Arp and his familiarity with the geometric compositions of Arp’s wife Sophie Taeuber-Arp, but he seems to want to free Kelly from their strong influence. I think he misses the mysterious synergy between Dadaism and Constructivism that informed the achievements of Arp, Taeuber-Arp, Kurt Schwitters, and van Doesburg in the years during and after World War I, a convergence of opposites that helped shape Kelly’s aesthetic.

As for Kelly’s improvisational use of full-strength color, it is not so far from the wonderfully playful, anything- cango-anywhere use of color in works by Fernand Léger and Alexander Calder that Kelly would have been seeing during his years in Paris. Nor can Matisse’s cutouts be ignored. But Bois chooses not to focus on these associations, perhaps because they show Kelly glancing backward or sideways, which is not something he is eager to consider. (In 2014 Kelly curated a show of Matisse drawings at Mount Holyoke College.)

Bois

may conceive of his closegrained writings on Kelly and Matisse

as case studies in the modern artist’s heroic escape from the constraints of older pictorial structures and ideas.

But an artist only appears to engage him as long as he is heading toward Bois’s preferred goal. Looking at some of Matisse’s work after the completion of the Barnes mural—charcoal portraits of the collectors Etta and Claribel Cone and the vigorous quotidian poetry of a painting entitled Interior with Dog—Bois accuses the artist of “a certain amount of backpedaling,” of “some ambivalence, one might even say nostalgia.” Bois does not care for what he refers to as “the traditional modeling and shading of the Cone portraits.”

He feels they lack “the allover energy” that he admires in Matisse’s work. I am left wondering if he isn’t simply exposing the limits of his own taste. What is at stake here is much more than one man’s taste. What is at stake is the historian’s willingness to accept the freedom of the artistic imagination—to embrace Matisse’s multitudinousness.

Matisse was obviously a very complicated man, and different commentators will quite naturally reveal different sides of his personality. The slightly clinical tone of Bois’s writings is true to a coolness in Matisse’s makeup. Bois sees Matisse as a methodical, deliberate artist, and there is no question that he was. But it can be instructive to turn from Bois’s account of the Barnes mural to the pages in Hilary Spurling’s brilliant biography of Matisse that deal with the same period.2 In Spurling’s account, Bois’s cool customer gives way to a more robust, convivial figure, his labors on the mural mingled with his eager friendship with the younger Surrealist painter André Masson.

Spurling gives to the story of Matisse’s work at the Barnes some of the hurried-up, carousing pace of a novel by Thackeray or Trollope. Bois might put this down to the limitations of the English author’s biographical imagination. Then again, Matisse, who was born in 1869, was in some sense a man of the nineteenth century—he had an intense interest in and affection for the work of Renoir—and a careful biographer might accuse Bois of forcing him too much into the mold of Left Bank philosophizing at its most megalomaniacal and austere.

Need we choose between Spurling and Bois? Certainly each author’s account of Matisse and the Barnes mural is illuminating in its own way. The trouble with Yve-Alain Bois is that he is all too sure that history is on his side, and is therefore disinclined to consider aspects of Matisse that might violate his preferred historical scheme. Bois has lost sight of what Isaiah Berlin referred to as “the crooked timber of humanity.”

Berlin was quoting Kant, who said that out of such material “no straight thing was ever made.” There is no career in modern art with more startling twists and turns than Matisse’s. One day he seems to stand with the revolutionaries, the next he is almost a conservative. To straighten all this out is to deny Matisse what finally binds us to him, which is his vexatious humanity.

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Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909–1954 (Knopf, 2005). See Richard Dorment’s review in these pages of the first volume of Spurling’s two-volume biography, January 14, 1999.

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55

The Bear’s Best Friend Magnum Photos

Natalie Angier

Coca-Cola for sale at the Western Navajo Nation Fair, Tuba City, Arizona, October 2015; photograph by Larry Towell

Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning)

by Marion Nestle, with a foreword by Mark Bittman and an afterword by Neal Baer.

Oxford University Press, 508 pp., $29.95 About eight years ago, faced with dwindling sales of Coke, Sprite, Barq’s Root Beer, and other candied and generally carbonated beverages in the Coca- Cola Company’s vast product line, Chris Dennis, a director of product management, retreated to a basement with a small team of engineers and related personnel to come up with the next big Real Thing. The team considered itself an edgy start-up operation within the larger parental whale, Dennis has said, able to “move fast” and “fail fast” without “the traditional red tape,” which at Coca- Cola must be very red indeed.

The end result of that basement brainstorming was Coca- Cola Freestyle, a soft drink–dispensing device billed by the company as “revolutionary” and the “fountain of the future” and now found in some 33,000 locations worldwide. Each unit is about the size of a standard vending machine but looks much jazzier, its cabinetry styled

by Pininfarina, the same Italian firm that designs Alfa Romeos and Ferraris.

By pressing colorful icons on a large touch screen, customers can choose from more than 170 different beverages and flavors, mixing and matching ingredients as their whimsy sees fit: I’ll have a kiwi-lime decaffeinated Coke with a splash of Seagram’s ginger ale, please.

Of particular, paradoxical note, the mechanism that permits Freestyle’s finely calibrated dispensation of various soda syrups and water is an adaptation of a technology developed for medical micropumps, to deliver just the right dose of lifesaving drugs. Micropumps are used in the treatment of cancer, chronic pain, and especially diabetes— an illness linked, in its Type 2 format, to the obesity that unlimited consumption of sugar-logged beverages can bring.

As it happens, neither Freestyle fountains nor personalized soda bottles nor mini- cans nor any other pop-up novelty act seems able to reverse a long-term slide in soda drinking, a trend that The New York Times called “the single largest change in the American diet” in recent history. Since the mid-1990s, sales of full- calorie soft drinks in the United States have plunged by more than 25 percent. The numbers for diet sodas are no better, with sales down almost 20 percent in the past five years—a likely 56

reflection of worries about artificial sweeteners. Bottled water is expected to surpass sweetened soda as the country’s number-one packaged beverage by 2017. Public health surveys also indicate that obesity rates in the US, after years of rising relentlessly, lately have plateaued among adults and school-age children and have even begun to fall in younger children. There’s no direct evidence tying a disenchantment with soda to improvements in the national fat index—after all, sales of sweetened breakfast cereals, cupcakes, and packaged white bread have fallen too, if by smaller amounts. Correlation is not causation. Nevertheless, it’s hard to ignore that the per capita purchase of fizzy soft drinks today is as low as it was back in 1986—which is when the rates of severe obesity began to soar.

W

hy has the public turned so measurably against soda? Effective messaging, for one: health advocates have long denounced soda and related “sugary drinks” as a particularly noxious example of junk food, empty calories that are gulped down quickly and inattentively, often just to lubricate the esophageal passage of other high- calorie snacks. For another, giving up sugared soft drinks is a clear and narrowly defined goal, and in the end not much of a sacrifice. Soda offers no beery buzz, no satisfying crunch. Who needs it?

Yet any success the anti-soda camp can claim has come in the teeth of extreme, unwavering, and, it must be said, unsurprising resistance from what Marion Nestle and her public health colleagues call Big Soda, to evoke parallels with that more familiar corporate black hat, Big Tobacco. Big Soda is not a formal organization, of course, but an alliance of financial stakeholders afloat on the liquid gold of the carbonated beverage, heretofore one of the most profitable products ever invented.

The major players include Coca- Cola and PepsiCo, the world’s two largest makers and purveyors of nonalcoholic beverages, which together generate annual revenues in excess of $100 billion; powerful trade groups like the American Beverage Association and the Grocery Manufacturers Association; and an assortment of bottlers, distributors, trucking companies and unions, restaurant chains, and the like.

In Soda Politics, Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at NYU, presents the elaborate lengths to which Big Soda will go to keep their products in view and available. “I am

awestruck by how well soda companies manage these tasks,” she writes.

No community group is too inconsequential to receive a grant from the Coke or Pepsi corporate foundations. No city contemplating a soda tax is too small or too poor to be the target of a massive and lavishly funded counteroffensive. No issue that might affect marketing is too trivial to be ignored by industry lobbyists.

Coke and Pepsi products and advertisements are so ubiquitous they’re like parked cars or gray squirrels, barely impinging on the conscious mind.

Start paying attention, and the reach is startling. You’ll find soda vending machines or soda cooler cabinets in virtually every setting where the flow of human traffic might slow down just long enough to insert cash or credit card: convenience stores, gas stations, drugstores, office lobbies, office supply stores, theaters, hospital lounges, highway rest stops, shopping malls, airports, and on every floor of thousands of hotels, right next to the ice machine.

“At least since the 1920s, Coca- Cola’s explicit goal has been to ensure that its products are always ‘within arm’s reach of desire,’” Nestle writes, citing Mark Pendergrast’s history of the Coca- Cola Company. Company representatives work closely with soda retailers to ensure that product displays are in full view the moment a customer walks in the door. Don’t forget the colorful signs and banners! One study of nearly three thousand neighborhood stores in Philadelphia found that two thirds displayed ads for soft drinks.

The two major soda companies spend nearly half a billion dollars annually just to advertise their cola products, and the ad campaigns are usually brilliant, and elastic. For example, Coke began featuring an anthropomorphized polar bear as a mascot nearly a century ago—who better to promote the refreshing zest of an ice- cold beverage than a jaunty white bear on ice?

More recently, as the real-life animal has become associated with global warming, melting glaciers, and drowning polar bear cubs, Coca- Cola has modified its message to present itself as the bear’s best friend and protector. In 2011, under the auspices of the World Wildlife Fund, the company started a conservation campaign called “Arctic Home,” offering limited- edition Arctic Home soda cans, soliciting public donations, and pledging $2 million of its

own funds over five years—a decidedly modest sum that critics derided.

Nevertheless, Coke and Pepsi’s history of catchy jingles, ennobling slogans, and lavishly produced advertisements has helped purchase the companies large reservoirs of public goodwill: more than 95 million people “like” Coca- Cola’s Facebook page, while 34 million Facebook users are friends of Pepsi. (The pages consist mainly of ads.)

Coca- Cola consistently ranks among the most admired companies in the world and shows up on lists like Fortune magazine’s “25 Best Global Companies to Work For.” People feel affection, often tinged with nostalgia, for good ol’ Pepsi and Coke. Baby boomers who have long since stopped drinking soda remember the days when they swore allegiance to one brand or the other and claimed they could tell the difference, although as Nestle points out, people fail on blind taste tests and often end up preferring a generic cola over either of the big-name labels.

By nearly every responsible measure,

the American diet is far too sugarfrosted, with the bulk of the sweeteners added during food processing for the sake of flavor “enhancement,” as opposed to the sugars that occur naturally in produce, milk, and whole grains.

The average American consumes some twenty-two teaspoons of added sugar a day—350 calories’ worth—which is three times the limit recommended by groups like the American Heart Association. Sodas and related sweetened beverages account for an astonishing eleven of those twenty-two gratuitous teaspoons.

Partly as a result of a high-sugar diet, people end up consuming far more calories than they need to get through the day. The body manages the surplus as best it can, generally by enlarging a genetically personalized assortment of the many fat depots with which the human frame is marbled—around the belly, thighs, buttocks, breasts, under the arms, across the upper back, sometimes the neck and cheeks. Admittedly, weight gain also delivers a small bit of extra muscle tissue in the mix, but it’s not enough to counter the burden that the augmented fat stores place on the heart, lungs, and joints. Obesity is associated with a heightened risk of a broad range of disorders, including heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes.

The exact mechanisms through which excess weight promotes a given The New York Review

illness aren’t always clear, but recent research suggests that obesity amounts to a state of chronic inflammation, a low-level activation of the immune system. The perpetual release of immunesignaling molecules, like interleukin proteins, can end up damaging cells and swamping other essential signaling networks in the body, including the insulin circuitry that keeps blood-sugar levels stable; and the breakdown of insulin signaling, or insulin resistance, is the hallmark of diabetes. Again, the link between obesity and diabetes is by no means settled science, and most overweight or obese people do not have diabetes (or at least not yet). But 90 percent of patients with Type 2 diabetes—that is, so- called adult- onset diabetes, though the disease is also found in children—are overweight or obese.

Research also suggests that sugar is particularly harmful when consumed in liquid form. One research team compared findings from 114 international dietary surveys with mortality data from the World Health Organization and concluded that sugared beverages accounted for 184,000 deaths a year, most from diabetes. A European study of 350,000 people concluded that for each addition of a twelve- ounce sugared beverage to one’s daily diet, the risk of diabetes climbed by 22 percent. Sweetened sodas are known to rot teeth and are thought to leach calcium from bones. Some authorities have suggested that soft drinks sweetened in the traditional manner, with sucrose—table sugar crystallized from cane or beet plants—are less noxious to health than beverages containing the notorious high-fructose corn syrup, a relatively cheap sweetener invented in the 1970s. Nestle is agnostic on the question, and points out that sucrose and corn syrup alike break down into more or less equal proportions of the simple sugars glucose and fructose.

Sugar quantity, she argues, matters far more than provenance.

With its profusion of charts, tables, and bulleted sidebars, Soda Politics reads more like an extended and often repetitive PowerPoint presentation than a book with a crisply organized narrative. Nestle expresses hope that community activists will use the volume as a handbook, to battle Big Soda with big data. Her underlying thesis is clear, and the story ongoing. The more the liberal consumption of soft drinks has been tied to the fattening of America and the rising rates of adultonset diabetes, Nestle argues, the more desperate the soda industry’s defenses have grown. Here, lobbyists cast doubt on studies suggestive of harm; there, they deny such studies exist. They hire prestigious scientists to show they care; they try to change the subject, to divert attention away from that awkward nutrition label on the back of the can.

Among the industry’s cleverest tactics

has been to take up the health and wellness mantle from a different angle—the “physical activity diversion,” as Nestle calls it. Soda makers concede that high obesity rates are a “serious” problem.

They insist the problem is “complex,” and no single food or beverage group is to blame. The solution they trumpet is exercise. “Overweight and obesity are a result of an imbalance between calories consumed and calories burned,” the American Beverage Association says.

May 12, 2016

Restoring that balance is simply a matter of adopting a sensible, varied diet and “getting plenty of exercise.”

In 2013, a full-page ad in The New York Times declared, “At Coca- Cola, we believe active lifestyles lead to happier lives. That’s why we are committed to creating awareness around choice and movement.” In other words, Coke can be a happy choice, if you couple it with Pilates. The soda industry has poured significant resources into the exercise diversion gambit, both here and abroad. Two years ago, Coca- Cola served as a major financier for the Fifth International Congress on Physical Activity and Public Health in Rio de Janeiro, a meeting promoted by prestigious groups like the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education (“Have you taken your 30

to weight loss than is exercise, although the healthiest method of all is a virtuous combination of the two.

The unpromising metabolic calculus notwithstanding, Big Soda has pushed the exercise line hard—Coca- Cola to the point of damaging its reputation. In 2015, the company backed a new nonprofit organization called the Global Energy Balance Network, which billed itself as a “science-based” approach to tackling obesity and featured prominent researchers like James O. Hill, an obesity expert at the University of Colorado School of Medicine; Gregory A. Hand, dean of the West Virginia University School of Public Health; and Steven N. Blair, a professor of exercise science and epidemiology at the University of South Carolina. The scientists insisted that Coke’s financial

One of Coke’s polar bear advertisements, the first of which appeared in 1922.

‘As the real-life animal has become associated with global warming, melting glaciers, and drowning polar bear cubs,’ Natalie Angier writes, ‘Coca-Cola has modified its message to present itself as the bear’s best friend and protector.’

minutes of physical activity today?”).

Dr Pepper Snapple, the third-largest soda-pop conglomerate, sponsors programs to encourage “Random Acts of Play” and the reduction of today’s “play deficit” through the distribution of sports equipment and the construction or upgrading of two thousand playgrounds across North America. Nestle estimates that Coca- Cola and PepsiCo spend about $1 billion a year supporting major sports events and associations like the Olympic Games, the World Cup, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League.

Nestle is quick to emphasize—more

than once—that she is a big proponent of regular physical activity and agrees that it is vital to overall health and wellbeing. Who can deny it? The problem is that it takes far more exercise to counter the casual consumption of sugared soft drinks than most people realize. If you want to burn off, say, four twelve-ounce cans of Pepsi or Dr Pepper a week, at 150 calories a can, plan on tacking another seventy minutes of jogging onto your weekly workout routine just as a remedy for soda. Those who need to lose weight, rather than simply keep it off, rarely succeed through exercise alone. To shed just one pound requires expending an extra 3,500 calories, which amounts to some seven hours of jogging—all without doing what many people do when they exercise a lot, which is consume more calories. Numerous studies have shown that dieting is a surer route

support would in no way influence their research or compromise their scientific autonomy. Yet the basic aim of the organization was made clear in an introductory video on the group’s website, in which Blair complained that discussions about weight gain too often focused on how much Americans ate and not enough on how little they exercised.

In fact, Blair said, there was “virtually no compelling evidence” that fast food, sweet beverages, or the like were at the heart of the obesity crisis.

The autonomy of the researchers was further called into question when the Associated Press published e-mails between Hill and Coke executives, comparing the nonprofit’s supposedly science-based mission to a “political campaign” for countering “radical organizations and their proponents”— the anti-soda crowd presumably among them. He also proposed that CocaCola underwrite a major study to better reveal a link between obesity and a lack of exercise. The study “could be a game changer,” Hill wrote, and “provide a strong rationale for why a company selling sugar water SHOULD focus on promoting physical activity.”

He wished to restore Coke’s image as “a company that brings important and fun things” to people’s lives.

Other health experts were outraged by the group and its message, declaring in a public letter released last August that Coca- Cola and its nonprofit sidekick were distorting the research and disseminating “scientific nonsense.”

The complaints quickly proved too

much to bear. Toward the end of 2015, the Global Energy Balance Network was disbanded, the University of Colorado returned its tainted grant money to Coca- Cola, and Rhona S. Applebaum, Coke’s chief scientist and architect of the nonprofit venture, took early retirement. The entire affair, Marion Nestle told The New York Times, “has been a public relations disaster for Coca- Cola.”

B

ig Soda has been more successful at beating back legislative efforts to reduce soda consumption—for example, by making it more expensive. Public health activists have long viewed sweetened sodas as an excellent target for what might be called a vice VAT, a value-added tax that would discourage the purchase of an unhealthy product (and, as a side benefit, would help pay for any medical costs that the use of the product might incur). Cigarette taxes offered a model for this approach: high prices have been shown to depress cigarette sales, especially among the young.

Health researchers calculated that a tax hike on soda of 12 to 20 percent—one or two cents per ounce—would significantly reduce demand, and they set out to persuade lawmakers of the wisdom of the levy.

The soda companies argued that it would be unfair to single out soft drinks for a tax: Why should cookies or potato chips get a pass? They claimed that the tax would hurt small businesses, lead to job losses, and unduly burden poor and minority communities—who were, after all, some of the biggest consumers of soda. They mocked the idea as unAmerican, an attack on free choice, a Euro-style intrusion of the nanny state.

Mostly, they talked with money, and lobbyists. Whenever and wherever legislators made the slightest gesture toward passing a soft drink tax, the soda industry instantly retaliated. Mayor Michael Nutter and the city council of Philadelphia wanted to tax soda at two cents an ounce. The American Beverage Association promised to donate $10 million to obesity prevention programs at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and, presto, the measure was withdrawn. David Paterson, governor of New York, proposed an 18 percent “obesity tax” on soft drinks. The industry spent $9.4 million on an aggressive lobbying and blitz-advertising campaign, disguised as a grassroots uprising called “New Yorkers Against Unfair Taxes.” The bill never came up for a vote. Similar measures failed in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Richmond and El Monte, California, and some two dozen other jurisdictions. Only Berkeley, a college town with one of the most progressive legislative records in the nation, managed to pass a soda tax of a penny per ounce.

The measure sailed through in 2014 with 76 percent of the vote.

But even the so- called People’s Republic of Berkeley would do well to remain vigilant, as the example of Mexico makes clear. International health activists consider Mexico their biggest victory to date in the soda tax wars. With one of the world’s highest rates of per capita soda consumption, as well as soaring rates of obesity and diabetes, the Mexican government decided in 2013 to impose a national tax on sugared drinks—raising their prices by about 10 percent. The tax appears to be working: according to a study by 57

Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health and the University of North Carolina, Mexicans cut back on soda drinking by 6 percent overall in 2014 and by an even greater percentage among the poor, although the Mexican soft drink industry disputes the findings.

But the enthusiasm of the health community was tempered in late 2015, when Mexico’s lower legislative house voted to cut the soda tax in half for soft drinks with half the sugar of standard Coke or Pepsi, a move that, inciden-

tally or otherwise, would have lowered the price of existing sweet beverages marketed for children. Stung by the international outcry, the Mexican Senate hastily overturned the tax- cut measure, but few believe the matter is settled for good.

More reliable than legislation, perhaps, is messaging, peer pressure and sneer pressure—the ongoing campaign to make soda look trashy and tired.

Yes, the piety of food purists can get irritating, and food fashions are always

ridiculous when taken to extremes.

The noisiest trend now is to demonize virtually all sweets and most carbohydrates, to the point where a ripe juicy honeydew melon is dismissed as “nature’s junk food.” But we all know the basic script for a reasonably healthy life. It hasn’t changed much in the last hundred years. Eat a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, moderate amounts of protein and fats, a minimum of added sugars, and don’t eat when you’re not hungry. If you drink

alcohol, don’t overdrink. Get some sort of exercise every day. Try not to obsess over food or talk too much about food or take pictures of your food and post them online.

Maybe it isn’t fair to single out soda for opprobrium when candy bars and frosted crullers are also nonnutritious calorie grenades. But sugared soft drinks happen to be an easy target. We don’t need them, our children don’t need them, and we surely won’t miss them when they’re gone.

You Laugh Uncontrollably Charles Simic Tomki NČ mec

Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson.

New Directions, 142 pp., $14.95 (paper) Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim, with an introduction by Adam Thirlwell.

New York Review Books, 117 pp., $14.00 (paper) Bohumil Hrabal’s complete works in Czech add up to nineteen volumes, of which at least twenty books have been translated into English, an achievement not many foreign fiction writers of the recent past can claim. I first heard his name when I saw Closely Watched Trains, a film based on his short novel of the same title that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1968.

But we had to wait until his other books started appearing in English in the 1990s to get to know his work.

The recent publication of Mr. Kafka, his collection of early stories, which I found as enjoyable as everything else of his I’ve read, made me go back and reread the books I already knew and all the ones that have been translated since, and as I did so, my admiration for Hrabal grew. He is not only a consistently entertaining storyteller, but some of his novels and stories are comic masterpieces that I wouldn’t advise bringing on planes or to doctors’ waiting rooms, where those overhearing your cackling may get the wrong idea and summon someone in authority to intervene. Serious works of literature that make us laugh uncontrollably are rare. When one remembers that Hrabal lived in a country and at a time in European history when there was absolutely nothing to laugh about, one’s amazement at what he accomplished is even greater.

Hrabal was born in 1914 to an unmarried mother in Brno, in what was then a province in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his father was a friend of hers from the same neighborhood. Her parents opposed the idea of her marrying the young man since he was about to be inducted into the army; he ended up on the Italian front in World War I and was subsequently discharged as an invalid. His son never met him. Up to the age of three, he lived with his grandparents in Brno while his mother worked 58

Bohumil Hrabal at the Canadian embassy in Prague, summer 1990

as an assistant bookkeeper in a brewery, where she met her future husband, Frantíšek Hrabal.

The family moved in 1919 to Nymburk, a small town on the banks of the Elbe where his stepfather became the manager of another brewery and where Hrabal, his parents, and a half-brother lived comfortably until the father lost his job in 1948 after the Communist takeover. The future writer was a mediocre student in school. He read a lot on his own, but regularly failed courses in Czech composition, jesting in his seventies that it had taken him until that moment to understand what the pluperfect is. With the help of private tutors he somehow finished school and enrolled to study law at Prague’s Charles University, but didn’t graduate until 1946, since Czech universities were shut down during the Nazi occupation. Like Franz Kafka, he was a doctor of law who never practiced. During the war he worked on the railway, and after that as a manual laborer at the Kladno steelworks and, following a serious injury in a paper recycling mill, as a stagehand in a theater, and somewhere in between these, as an insurance agent and traveling salesman. He married a waitress and lived in Prague and in a village not far from the city, shuttling between his small cottage overrun by weeds and cats and his small apartment and favorite pub in the city.

It’s amazing to discover how well read Hrabal was in his youth and how

much his compatriots read. They had to compensate as a nation, he said later, for having no ocean, and instead had to have oceans of knowledge. One Christmas his uncle gave him Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, not a book you’d normally give to someone young, but the fantastic tales and the bawdy humor of the French Renaissance physician, humanist, and classics scholar made a lasting impression on him. Of course, he read Kafka and Jaroslav Hašek and other Czech writers, plus Chekhov, Babel, Céline, Bruno Schulz, but far less predictably, the stories of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Nelson Algren—all that and much more thanks to tireless translators and publishers in Prague who seemed not to have missed a book worth reading in another language, not only in the years before the war, but also afterward, under communism, when translations that were made with no hope of ever being seen in bookstores were circulated privately in manuscript.

H

rabal started as a poet whose idols were Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and the French Surrealists. A book of his poems was published in 1948, but like many other books was withdrawn from circulation after the Communist coup d’état. Two stories followed in 1956, but his first novel, Palaverers, did not appear until 1963 and was followed shortly after by two of his

finest novels, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age and Closely Watched Trains in 1964 and 1965. From that time onward, Hrabal could call himself a writer, except that living in a country where books were banned even after being printed and bound didn’t make the life of a writer easy. Two of his most popular novels in Czechoslovakia, I Served the King of England (1971) and The Little Town Where Time Stood Still (1973), were published in samizdat editions.

In 1975 Hrabal gave an interview that shocked his readers at home and abroad, in which he made “self- critical” comments that enabled him to publish, a privilege he preserved to the end of Communist rule in 1989. Understandably, he wanted his work to circulate beyond the underground network of blacklisted writers, but not so understandably, it did not seem to embarrass him to accept the perks that went along with being a writer approved of by the regime, such as being allowed to travel abroad and even visit the United States, while having his full artistic freedom curtailed at home. In January 1977 he did not sign Charter 77—the famous protest against the Communist government by prominent writers, intellectuals, and public officials that eventually gathered eight hundred signatures— joking afterward that while his most sensitive friends chose emigration, he emigrated inwardly during those years to the Golden Tiger, his watering hole of choice in Prague.

“I have never described myself as a writer,” he said in an interview. “I have always said I am a recorder, or minutetaker. Most of those lovely stories I hear from others.” Drinking beer and shooting the breeze in pubs were his favorite occupations. On his visit to New York in 1988 he made himself at home at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street and met friends there throughout the day. With that daily routine, he resembled his compatriot and literary hero Jaroslav Hašek, the author of The Good Soldier Švejk, one of the funniest novels of all time, whose own drinking and carousing were legendary in the Prague of his day.

“The folklore of the city is my aesthetics,” Hrabal said. That doesn’t strike me as quite right. The action in his books more often takes place in small towns. He said that he always had the impression that people who kept rabbits, hoed their own potatoes, and butchered animals lived more inThe New York Review

It was inevitable that he’d write about

them. His mother was a freethinking woman who scandalized the citizens in the little town where her husband was a brewery manager and made a few young women envious seeing her ride a bike in a short skirt. She occasionally told amusing stories; his uncle Pepin didn’t stop telling them. He was the inspiration for Hrabal’s dazzling early novel Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, marvelously translated into English by Michael Henry Heim. The book consists of a single sentence strung together by a former shoemaker, former Austro-Hungarian army private, ladies’ man, and beerhall philosopher in a rambling monologue, 117 pages long. Numerous farcical stories with frequent digressions on other subjects bring to life a character who would find himself at home in any of the great picaresque novels that his creator read and admired. Here is how he sounds: Here I am pushing seventy and having the time of my life with you like the emperor with that Schratt lady, promising you red leather pumps like the ones I once made for Doctor Karafiát’s sister, who was a beauty, but had one glass eye, which is a problem, because you never know what it’s going to do next, a hatter from ProstČjov once told me he took a woman with a glass eye to the pictures and she sneezed and it flew out and during the break they had to go crawling under the seats for it, but she found it and wiped it off, pulled up her eyelid, and pop! in it went, by the way, baking is as much of an art as shoemaking, my brother Adolf was a trained baker, you slide the shovel into the oven like it’s a billiard cue, and if the inspector catches you licking your fingers when you’re making rolls you’ll get a bop on the beezer, and every time a baker does number one he’s got to wash his hands, while a shoemaker can pick his nose all day if he likes, a butcher has to watch himself as well, we had one in our platoon by the name of Kocourek, Miroslav Kocourek, and this Kocourek had a bandaged finger, and one day he was stuffing liverwursts and the bandage disappeared into one of them, and because chances were an enlisted man would get the one with the bandage he forgot about it, but guess what, young ladies, it was the doctor! that’s right, he was on his third liverwurst, and the minute he cut into it he recognized his handiwork and puked

May 12, 2016

and Kocourek was sent to the front, but did he die there? no, he turned hero and won all kinds of medals, I spent some time pushing goats tied together in a wheelbarrow to the butcher’s, and one day two little kids gamboled along next to me and the goats kept licking my hands, and when I stopped in a field to rest, the kids started licking my hands, and I wept bitter tears, what was I doing with a butcher?

This is how people told stories to one another when there was no radio or television, Hrabal says. Indeed, how else did they pass the time and amuse themselves for all those centuries before Twitter and the Internet? “In the vegetable garden grows the elder tree, and uncle is in Kiev,” a Russian proverb

Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the

prisoner are making out is all one can expect:

Time of the Cult, beautifully translated

by Paul Wilson, was written in the 1950s but not published in Czechoslovakia until 1965. The stories take place during the time of political and social turmoil after the Communists came to power and set out to remake Czech society along Stalinist lines by consigning members of the defeated classes either to prison or to manual labor. Three of the stories come from Hrabal’s own experiences at the Kladno steelworks, where former businessmen, professors, judges, policemen, priests, and female convicts unloaded truckloads of scrap metal for blast furnaces—one of the trucks carried rusty crucifixes and angels taken from village churchyards— while swapping tales about their former lives and comments on their

“Things are getting much better, doctor,” said Bárta, the loader.

“Christian Europe is consolidating.”

“What Europe?” asked the doctor of philosophy derisively. “And what d’you mean ‘Christian’? It’s more Jewish than ever before. . . .”

“It is Christian,” said the merchant.

“That’s crap,” said the doctor of philosophy, raising his hand. “At one end of the spectrum you’ve got one brilliant Jew, Christ, and at the other end you’ve got another genius, Marx. Two specialists in macrocosms, in big pictures. All the rest of it is Mother Goose territory.”

Everett Collection

tensely. In the midst of some ordinary story, they’d surprise you by saying something extraordinary. Such moments were his building blocks, Hrabal claims, the driving force behind his writing. As true as this may have been, any reader of his work realizes sooner or later that there’s a lot about him and his family in his fiction. Every job he ever held and practically everything his parents ever did while they were alive is recounted, starting with The Little Town Where Time Stood Still and ending with Harlequin’s Millions (1981), which describes their final years in a magnificent baroque castle turned into an old people’s home.

Václav Necká Ĝ and Jitka Bendová in Ji Ĝ í Menzel’s film Closely Watched Trains (1966), which is based on a novel by Bohumil Hrabal

says. Someone starts a story, which soon reminds him of another, and that one of another and still another. Beyond that point, the storyteller either forgets how he began, or miraculously, after many additional detours, he manages to pick up the thread of the original story. Of course, if these digressions are entertaining, as they almost always are in Hrabal’s work, only a reader eager to know the point of the story gets impatient; the others sit back and enjoy the ride. Telling a story in that way tends to be a habit of those with interesting lives, long memories, inventive imaginations, and a belief that even unrelated events and minor details need to be a part of their narrative in order for their listeners to get the full picture.

Of course, there were literary prototypes for this sort of rambling narrative: Rabelais and Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, Gogol, and of course Hašek’s Švejk with his cock-and-bull stories. A blend of folk humor and storytelling filtered through an educated and irreverent intellect is what we get. That being so, every conceit men and women are prone to becomes a butt of the jokes.

This kind of humor has no inhibitions; it doesn’t put up with our charades but strips us down to our underwear. Being a fool is our destiny, our second nature, it tells us. Those who can laugh at themselves now and then know that to be true. “I was always lucky in my bad luck,” a waiter in Hrabal’s I Served the King of England says. Even our tragedies can be comical, though most of us would be reluctant to admit it.

current predicaments. “Humanity will forgive you if you’re a horse’s ass, but if you speak five languages,” one them says, “they’ll never let you live it down.”

This, one must remember, was the heyday of socialist realism in the People’s Democracies, when writers, like their Russian counterparts, were expected to write about workers building socialism, portraying their lives in a heroic and idealized manner. Instead, Hrabal writes about pitiful, isolated people, history’s losers, destined to become extinct.

One of the stories is called “Strange People,” and they are indeed that, a cross-section of Czech society, including former prostitutes. A few of the workers decide to call a strike because everybody’s quotas have been raised without their consultation, a decision that flies in the face of the principles of comradely conduct, as one of them points out to the shop steward. “Look here, comrades,” the steward tells them, “the imperialists are closing in and there’s no time to waste. We have to pour the molten steel of peace down their bellicose throats.”

In other words, forget it.

What makes these tales powerful is their brutal realism, the wretchedness and hopelessness of people who’d been promised a workers’ paradise now laboring in a place where the perpetual smoke and fire from furnaces recall to me the depictions of hell in Hieronymus Bosch. With that kind of life, a bit of black humor or an occasional act of kindness from a guard who looks away while some worker and a former female

“Mr. Kafka,” the title story of the new collection, is about a day in the life of a lonely young man living in Prague fully aware that he bears the last name of the famous writer. He works at a lowly job, in a store with five floors of toys, roams the city in his free hours, and has all kinds of interesting encounters. The narrative feels like a montage.

“I don’t actually write,” Hrabal once said in his talks with readers. “I cut, and then glue the cut-outs together into collages.” Short scenes and stunningly original bits of poetic description alternate to create a lyrical mood and convey the state of mind of the hero adrift in a grim and impoverished metropolis.

A streetcar rumbles by with a few dead men inside hanging by their hands. A pedestrian stumbles to his knees and tries to ignite a cobblestone. Parakeets flit about in their cages like poetic metaphors. In a church the Mother of God’s hands are locked in cement so she can’t cover her son’s eyes. A little girl looks at a falling leaf and says, “That leaf’s hands are sore, so it had to let go.”

Strolling by the river where the city appears to walk on its hands, he wonders why the cars are driving along the river upside down, their wheels in the air as though sledding along on their roofs, and why passersby greet each other as though they were scooping water into their hats.

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he influence of Surrealist poets and painters on some modern novelists has been overlooked. Would Hrabal and the South American magic realists write the way they did without the Surrealists’ example? Silent film, both American and European tworeel comedies, also had an unacknowledged part here and there. Reading the story “Breaking Through the Drum” in this collection, about a movie usher who takes tickets and shows people to their seats, made me think of Harold Lloyd’s maniacal character in his comedies. When he was in primary school the usher (and narrator) of “Breaking Through the Drum” loved drawing the class’s seating plans for the teacher, and once he grew older, still obsessed with discipline and order, he’d ask a whole row of people in the movie theater to move so he could seat some customer precisely where he wanted them to be.

After years of this, he gets promoted and works as an usher in bigger theaters, concert and lecture halls, becoming more and more strict.

Classical music ruins the narrator’s career. It begins with him falling in love with the sound of a string quartet 59

and reaches its finale in an open-air performance of a symphony orchestra.

As the conductor appears and taps his baton on the music stand and the audience falls silent, a brass band playing a polka in a beer garden over the adjoining wall can be heard. We can hear the Symphonie Pathétique, with the conductor directing the orchestra like a high priest on one side, and the deafening racket of brass on the other.

The Czech nation is split in half, with lovers of both kinds of music climbing

walls, shaking fists at their compatriots on the other side, the insults culminating in a free-for-all with the unhinged usher flying head first, arms spread wide, and crashing into the drums of the polka band.

Unlike the people in the other stories in this book, the usher in “Breaking through the Drum” is a far more developed character, his obsessions affectionately and astutely rendered.

What made Baudelaire so great, Hrabal said in an interview, was the French

poet’s profound compassion. He noticed poor street girls and destitute old men, and so does Hrabal. His stories and novels are not only hilarious, but are full of extraordinary depictions of the suffering of people and animals.

He even took pity on defeated Nazi soldiers running for their lives in 1944.

“The highest law is love, the love that is compassion,” says Hanta, the hero of his most autobiographical novel, Too Loud a Solitude. Like Hrabal, Hanta has been compacting wastepaper and

books in a recycling plant, while quoting from Schopenhauer.

Everything changes the moment one takes pity on a human being or a mouse cowering in a corner. All of a sudden, a different world appears before our eyes, both more terrifying and more beautiful. That’s what makes Hrabal’s stories and novels genuinely moving.

And so was his end. He died in 1997 at the age of eighty-two, falling out of a hospital window in Prague while apparently reaching to feed some pigeons.

Stalin’s Man in Mayfair Michael Ignatieff

Could World War II have been avoided? Or if not avoided, since Hitler was Hitler, could it have been postponed until the Western democracies were better prepared to defeat him? A credible threat in 1938 from the Soviets, backed by the British and French, to come to the aid of the Czechs might have stopped Hitler in his tracks. The Soviets had issued such a guarantee to the Czechs in 1932, but it was contingent on the French keeping their part of the bargain. In 1938, Hitler gambled that the Soviets and the West would never stand against him together. At Munich in 1938 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier sold out the Czechs and proved him right.

This question—of whether the war could have been avoided or at least delayed—dominates the diaries of Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to Britain throughout the grim decade of appeasement. Maisky enjoyed extraordinary access to the entire British elite, because he had been a Menshevik exile in London between 1912 and 1917 and had established friendships with Sydney and Beatrice Webb, G. D. H. Cole, and George Bernard Shaw. Upon becoming ambassador in 1932, Maisky consolidated these friendships on the Labour left, while assiduously cultivating figures on the Conservative right, notably Winston Churchill.

In these diaries, Churchill, then in the political wilderness, emerges as the figure who most clearly understood that the Western democracies’ only chance of deterring Hitler lay in an alliance with the Soviet Union. In 1936, Churchill told Maisky: “We would be complete idiots were we to deny help to the Soviet Union at present out of a hypothetical danger of socialism which might threaten our children and grandchildren.”

In 1937 at a state banquet Churchill broke off a conversation with King George VI in order to engage Maisky in a probing discussion of whether Stalin’s purges of the Party and the army, then reaching their paroxysm, would leave Russia too weak to face Germany. While Churchill’s attentions to 60

Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932–1943 edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky and translated from the Russian

by Tatiana Sorokina and Oliver Ready.

Yale University Press, 584 pp., $40.00

Ivan Maisky (second from left), the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943, with Winston Churchill at the Allied ambassadors’ lunch at the Soviet embassy, September 1941. General Władysław Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish government in exile, is second from right.

the Russian ambassador were being carefully noticed in the room, Maisky blandly assured him that the purges would strengthen, not weaken the country. Churchill shook his head distrustfully and remarked, “A weak Russia presents the greatest danger for the cause of peace and for the inviolability of our Empire. We need a strong, very strong Russia.”

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he purges did the cause of a SovietWestern alliance against fascism no good at all. Maisky himself barely survived these purges—the diary breaks off for long periods when he returned to Moscow for chastisement and reeducation—but his usefulness to Stalin as a conduit and source of information seems to have saved him. The pressure on Maisky can only be imagined: members of his London staff were called home and executed; his wife’s relatives were sent to the gulag and she suffered a nervous breakdown. Sixty-two percent of the top-level Soviet diplomats were wiped out. Not even in his diary, which he wrote secretly, did Maisky confess his own terror and anxiety.

Stalin’s purges led many, including the American ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, to doubt that the Soviets

were capable of standing up to Hitler.

Kennedy (“tall, strong, with red hair, energetic gestures, a loud voice, and booming, infectious laughter—a real embodiment of the type of healthy and vigorous business man that is so abundant in the USA”) told Maisky that “the Brits claim . . .you would not be able to help Czechoslovakia if it were attacked

by Germany, even if you wished to.”

Maisky insisted this was not so, but the impression Kennedy retained of this exchange gave him another reason to advise Roosevelt to stay out of a European war that Kennedy believed Britain and France were bound to lose.

As Chamberlain prepared to go to Berchtesgaden to discuss Czechoslovakia with Hitler in mid-September 1938, Maisky journeyed down to Churchill’s estate at Chartwell. Churchill showed him a brick cottage he was building with his own hands, “slapped the damp and unfinished brickwork with affection and pleasure,” and assured the Soviet ambassador that Chartwell was “not a product of man’s exploitation by man,” but entirely paid for by Churchill’s royalties. The purpose of Maisky’s visit was to get Churchill to tell Chamberlain’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, that the Soviets had promised they would protect Czecho-

slovakia, provided the French did so too. This, Maisky hoped, would stiffen the British position in their negotiations with Hitler in Munich later in September 1938. It was too late. Chamberlain and Daladier gave Hitler a free hand to absorb the Sudetenland and extinguish Czech freedom. After the capitulation, Maisky went to commiserate with Jan Masaryk, the Czech ambassador in London. The young Masaryk sobbed on Maisky’s shoulder and whispered: “They’ve sold me into slavery to the Germans.”

By the time of Munich, the antiappeasement alliance between Conservative grandees like Churchill and Labour politicians like Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood had taken shape. Greenwood is a forgotten figure now, but it was he, Maisky tells us, who really ripped into Chamberlain in a private meeting after Munich. When Chamberlain tried to persuade Greenwood that Hitler was “an honest man” and could be trusted, Greenwood cut him off: “Have you read . . . Mein Kampf?”

Maisky’s failure to warn his masters in Moscow of the outcome in Munich put him in mortal danger back home.

For a time he feared recall to the USSR and disappearance into the gulag. To reassure his masters, he placed a menacing full-length portrait of Stalin in military uniform in the reception room of the embassy, “so displayed as to dominate the room.” In March 1939, when Hitler was about to absorb the rest of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain began to edge closer to the Soviets, visiting the Soviet embassy, but with Hitler’s invasion of Poland now barely six months away, it was too late. Even at this penultimate hour, Chamberlain assured Maisky, with glassy-eyed selfdelusion, that neither the German nor Italian people wanted war.

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ecalled to Moscow in April 1939 for a terrifying tête-à-tête with the boss, or vozhd, as Stalin was known, Maisky was instructed to return and gain, even at this late hour, a commitment from Britain that it would not seek a separate peace with Germany. In May, however, Stalin changed course. He suddenly dismissed Maisky’s oldest friend and protector, Maxim Litvinov, from his post as foreign minister, leaving Maisky, in the words of the diary editor, Gabriel Gorodetsky, “the sole genuine exponent of a pact with the The New York Review

May 12, 2016

In mid-June 1941, Churchill authorized disclosure to Maisky of evidence, collected from code-breaking of German signals, that Hitler was about to attack the Soviet Union. So suspicious was Stalin that Britain and Germany would strike a deal against Russia that he refused to believe the British warnings. When Hitler attacked across the Russian border on June 22, 1941, the Soviet command was caught by surprise and Soviet forces fell back pell-mell.

Once the Soviet Union was finally

on Britain’s side, Maisky became the courier between Stalin and Churchill, relaying personal messages to Chequers, then sitting and taking tea with Clementine Churchill, watching while Churchill absorbed them. As early as the summer of 1941, Stalin demanded a second front in Europe, and from the beginning Churchill refused. Achieving the second front became Maisky’s dominant objective in London for the remainder of his ambassadorship. He stirred up the British Communists, the trade unionists, and everyone in a broad left front to demand an Allied

landing in Europe to ease the pressure on the heroic Soviet ally. Sovietophilia reached its zenith in 1942 and 1943 and this common front atmosphere created a London social scene—never seen before and never to be seen again— in which Lord Beaverbrook thought there was nothing odd about keeping three portraits on his mantelpiece (Stalin, Roosevelt, and George VI) and Maisky supped at Beaverbrook’s table with Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s envoy; Churchill’s daughter-inlaw (with whom Harriman was having an affair); and the left-wing journalist Michael Foot.

Already in 1943, the diaries lay bare the grim outlines of the postwar order that Stalin would impose once his armies rolled into Eastern Europe.

Maisky, dealing with the Polish government in exile in London, parroted the vohzd’s brutality toward the Poles.

Maisky writes: “It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Poland is generally incapable of prolonged and sustained existence as a fully independent and sovereign national organism.” Years before it happens, in other words, the extinction of Polish freedom is already prefigured in these diaries.

Salzburg Museum

West.” Once again, what saved Maisky was his irreplaceable access to the British elite. Stalin feared the British and French would make a “second Munich,” this time at the Soviet Union’s expense, and so he kept Maisky on to give him advance warning of such a possibility.

Maisky continued to try to negotiate an Anglo-Soviet agreement against Germany throughout the summer of 1939, all the while confessing to his diary: “What, in fact, can England (or even England and France together) really do for Poland . . . if Germany attacks . . . ?” The vozhd evidently concluded the same and the AngloFrench-Soviet negotiations broke down in August 1939.

What replaced them—the MolotovRibbentrop pact between Germany and the Soviet Union in August 1939— appears to have come as a thunderbolt to Maisky, at least if the diary is to be believed. A nonplussed Maisky could only write, with feeble understatement, “Our policy is obviously undergoing a sharp change of direction. . . .”

With the Soviets neutralized, Hitler struck at Poland on September 1, 1939.

Ever the agile apparatchik, Maisky was soon parroting the new line. As German troops advanced on Warsaw from the west, Soviet troops invaded from the east, seizing eastern Poland and Belorussia, as Maisky piously put it, “in order to protect the population’s lives and property.”

Surprisingly, even after the HitlerStalin pact, senior British leaders continued to receive Maisky. In a meeting in October 1939 at the Admiralty with Churchill, Maisky sought to persuade the new Sea Lord that Stalin would never go to war against Britain and France. Churchill appears to have believed him, but few others did. Maisky was ostracized by polite British society, as Britain faced Hitler alone. By May 1940, as Germany swept through Belgium, France, and Holland and drove the British army back to Dunkirk, Maisky wrote in his diary that “the Anglo-French bourgeois elite is getting what it deserves” for its “mortal hatred of ‘communism’” and its failure to make common cause with the Soviet regime.

In June 1940, Ambassador Kennedy came to see Maisky and they agreed, at least if Maisky is to be believed, that the upper classes of British society were “completely rotten.” So worried did Maisky become about a British collapse in 1940 that he asked for instructions from Moscow about how to “conduct myself if the Germans were to occupy the district in London in which our embassy is located.” Being Jewish, Maisky would not have been surprised to have found himself on a list, apparently circulated in Berlin at that time, of the people Hitler had ordered to be shot once Britain was occupied.

Even when the Hitler-Stalin pact left Britain to face the German onslaught alone, after the Russians invaded Poland, working people in Britain continued to harbor affection for the Russian people. In the autumn of 1940, during the German bombardment of London, Maisky visited bomb shelters in East London and was astonished to be greeted with cheers from the crowd, some singing the “Internationale” and one old lady, her “face webbed with wrinkles,” crying out, “Our Russia is still alive!”

Baladine Klossowska: La Contemplation Intérieure (Rilke dormant sur un petit sofa à Muzot), 1921; watercolor portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke by his lover Klossowska, at the top of which he wrote a poem that is translated into English for the first time below.

INWARD GAZE Sorrow is a stubborn piece of land through which, darkling, the blessed mind sends down roots so as to bloom.

Whereas, in you, my resting heart, all things stay nameless.

It’s from the outside things are named: named for doubt, named for the moment; but see how quick we set bliss amongst the names.

And then, the speckless hind steps out, and, over her, the strongest star, fulfilled within the frame.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated from the German by Paul Eprile, with Alfred Corn)

As the Soviet armies began to sweep everything before them in late 1943, Maisky and Anthony Eden, his closest confidant in the British government, began to dream of what the postwar world would look like. Maisky told Britain’s foreign secretary, “What will the world look like, say, in the twentyfirst century? It will, of course, be a socialist world.” Of course, and for good measure, he added, the twentieth century will not be the American century, but the Russian. By then, Maisky was so close to Eden that Churchill had to order his foreign secretary not to share Churchill’s correspondence with Stalin with the Soviet ambassador.

In the spring of 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt decided in Washington not to launch a second front in Europe that year, choosing instead the assault on Italy. Stalin was furious: his ambassador had not delivered the second front, and he was now expendable. Maisky suddenly found himself yanked home and dismissed by the vozhd. Terrified of what would happen on his return, Maisky instructed his wife, “whatever happens,” to send copies of his diary— which he called “My Old Lady”—to Stalin himself, in what appears to have been a desperate attempt to prove that even in the private recesses of his mind, he had remained loyal.

Back home, he tried to live down his fame in London and work his way back into favor. He translated for Stalin briefly at Yalta and at Potsdam, but the old dictator dressed him down brutally and Maisky understood that his life hung by a thread. At the end of the war he sought survival by becoming an academic at the Russian Academy of Sciences. His colleagues—Maxim Litvinov and Alexandra Kollontai—died, and he hung on in the increasingly paranoid last years of Stalin’s life, only to be arrested for spying for the British and interrogated in the basement of the Lubyanka prison in the final months before Stalin’s death in the spring of 1953. In a poem written from prison to his wife on his seventieth birthday, Maisky lamented: I lived life in a major key . . .

And now my star has flickered out in a dark sky, And the way forward is hidden in a dark shroud, And I meet this day behind a stone wall. . . .

He was eventually released by Khrushchev in 1955 and allowed to write his memoirs. He died in 1975. He was the canniest of survivors, but his survival was not pretty: he lied, confessed to crimes he’d never committed, allied himself with the notorious butcher Lavrenti Beria in the tumultuous battle for succession after Stalin died in order to exonerate himself, but somehow managed to come out in one piece, preserving his diaries and his version of events.

His diaries, recovered from Russian archives and superbly edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky, are exceptionally vivid. Whether they are trustworthy is another matter. He was an exceedingly intelligent, agile, but always vulnerable servant of a tyrant, and as such, he censored even his private thoughts, but this lends his diaries a special fascination, as you watch a vain and clever man maneuvering to survive in the middle of a Europe heading toward the abyss.

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Rio: The War of the Favelas

Although visitors lured by the prospect of sun, surf, samba, and soccer may not perceive it, Rio de Janeiro is actually two very distinct cities. Some five million people live at or near sea level in what Brazilians describe as “the asphalt,” supplied with all the usual public services: subways, electricity, garbage collection, and at least a semblance of the rule of law.

But another million or more Cariocas, as Rio residents call themselves, have been consigned to “the hillside,” a world of squatter settlements known as favelas, most of them indeed on hills, in which normal urban amenities like sewers and running water are scarce and a strikingly different system of laws, values, and conduct prevails.

Misha Glenny’s Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio aims to give a sense of what life is like in those favelas, which, though they exist on the margins of every Brazilian metropolis, are especially visible and important in Rio, where they number more than one thousand and overlook Ipanema, Copacabana, and other elegant neighborhoods. The book’s arrival is timely: with the 2016 Summer Olympics scheduled to begin in Rio in August, the world’s attention is focused on the city, and Brazil’s success or failure in dealing with what it perceives as its biggest public security challenge, the threat of violence in favelas, is relevant not just to the country’s 200 million people, already grappling with the Zika virus and the biggest corruption scandal in Brazilian history, but also to the thousands of tourists, athletes, and journalists who will flock to Rio for the games.

Outsiders tend to think of the favelas as lawless places, but that’s not quite true. In City of God (1997), Paulo Lins’s novel about growing up in a violent housing project whose residents had been forcibly relocated from favelas the Rio authorities had razed, Lins describes a society based on consideração—literally “consideration.”

In favela-speak the word is closer to “deference” or “respect.” Favelas do not offer even the pretense that all men are created equal, much less women.

Instead there is a clearly defi ned hierarchy, at the top of which is a criminal don whose word and whims are law, rigorously enforced. Some of these chefões, or big bosses, are relatively benevolent or rational, in which case life for the working-class poor who make up most of the population in any favela can be tolerable. But others are violent, paranoid, and, though cunning, not particularly intelligent, which can make life miserable for the ordinary favelado.

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his is not a phenomenon new to Rio: nearly a century ago, the Carioca writer and flaneur Benjamim Costallat observed that “the favela is a city within the city, perfectly diverse and absolutely autonomous.” But as fave62

attention. Nor was it as colorfully bohemian as the lyrics of samba composers like Cartola, Noel Rosa, Nelson Sargento, and Carlos Cachaça might suggest. But as Janice Perlman notes in The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro (1976)—which along with her more recent Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (2010) remains the most comprehensive academic study of the city’s favelas available in English—even as late as the mid-1970s, around the time Nem was born, favela residents could enjoy a life “rich in associational experience, commonly imbued with friendship and cooperative spirit, and relatively free from crime and interpersonal violence.” What policing there was concentrated on what Brazilians call contravenção—infractions like running the jogo do bicho, a numbers game based on twenty-five animals. “I felt safer walking around the favela at night, and living there, than I ever had in Cambridge or New York!” Perlman adds.

What changed everything was the arrival of cocaine, which coincided with Brazil’s transition from a military dictatorship to a boisterous democracy— and a loosening of police and political repression. Glenny gives the date of Rio’s cocaine explosion as 1984, the last year of the dictatorship, but 1980 seems even more appropriate. In July of that year, as a result of a military takeover in neighboring Bolivia, known as “the Cocaine Coup” because it was supported and partly fi nanced by a leading drug cartel, General Luis García Meza became Bolivia’s “narcodictator.” He installed Colonel Luis Arce Gómez as his minister of the interior, putting the thuggish officer in charge of both political repression and coordinating with the main drug cartel in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in eastern Bolivia.

Almost immediately, Rio was flooded with cocaine of Bolivian origin, and the numbers game bosses who had long controlled the favelas, while dabbling in marijuana as a secondary activity, were pushed aside, often brutally. Glenny mentions one rather roundabout drug route from northern Bolivia into the Brazilian Amazon and then overland to Brazil’s urban centers, but there were also others that were equally, if not even more, important.

Because Colombian cartels had not yet consolidated their control of the cocaine trade and shifted production to their homeland, the drug could also be shipped by road or railway directly from Santa Cruz, through a porous border, and then on to São Paulo and Rio; another important pathway piggybacked on a traditional route used to smuggle appliances across the Paraná River from Paraguay into Brazil.

Glenny is correct to conceive of the 1980s and onward as a true “battle for Rio,” and he clearly sympathizes with the beleaguered favela residents, caught as they are between the drug gangs and the police. He also gives us portraits, complete with humanizing small details, of the police officers who

Larry Rohter

Young men at the top of the Vidigal favela, Rio de Janeiro, 2010

las have grown and metastasized, they have seemed increasingly intractable, challenging the capacity of the state to govern. Rio has police, two forces to be exact, the military police and the civil police, but historically they have often been at odds with each other rather than working together, and have generally been unwilling or unable—most likely both—to go into the favelas.

Corruption is widespread, and when police do venture into the favelas, it is often with guns blazing, shooting indiscriminately at anything that seems suspicious.

In addition, there are “militias” of off- duty officers and retired cops, with a lineage that stretches back to the death squads active during the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. They don’t hesitate to kill drug dealers large and small, but their motivation is often not clear, since some of the militia groups have themselves taken over lucrative criminal activities controlled by the bosses they are eliminating, and they sometimes clash with on- duty police.

Finally, there are three large and mutually antagonistic alliances of drug lords, another legacy of the dictatorship. The most powerful of these, the Red Command, emerged after common criminals were allowed to mingle in jail with left-wing political prisoners, who passed on organizational techniques and a sense of discipline. The other two groups, the Friends of Friends and the Third Pure Command, are the product of subsequent schisms.

To tell this exceedingly complicated story, Glenny, a British journalist whose previous books include McMafi a: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (2008),* focuses on Antônio Francisco Bonfi m Lopes, nicknamed Nem, for many years the drug boss of Rocinha, a favela whose approximately 150,000 residents make it Rio’s biggest. In Portuguese, Lopes’s street name is a slangy shortening of the word for “little kid,” but also carries an undertone of nullity—nem can mean “without,” “not even,” or “never”— and that is how his life begins. Born in

*Reviewed in these pages by Joshua Hammer, October 23, 2008.

Rocinha in 1976, he loses his father, a bartender who is shot at work, when he is a child, endures a mother who is a neglectful drunkard, and seems to have few prospects.

Glenny’s approach offers both advantages and disadvantages. Because of Rio’s unusual geography, sandwiched between mountains and the South Atlantic Ocean, each of the city’s favelas has a different dynamic, population, and leadership, so generalizations are dangerous; but emphasizing the largest offers a larger, more varied cast of characters. In addition, Nem starts as a sympathetic character: when introduced to us, he has just been promoted to supervisor for a company that distributes a magazine listing TV programs. But his baby daughter falls ill, he doesn’t have the money the hospital is demanding, and so, out of desperation, he asks Rocinha’s drug boss for a loan and is pulled into the drug trade, fi rst as a common soldier, then as an accountant, moving up the ladder as he would at any other company, in a trajectory typical of favela drug bosses.

Glenny mentions Fernandinho Beira-Mar, Rio’s most feared and powerful drug lord during much of the period covered by Nemesis, describing him as representing “a new generation of dynamic and determined commanders.” As top man in the Red Command, Fernandinho Beira-Mar— “Little Freddy Seashore” would be a literal translation—can’t be ignored.

He established a guns-for- drugs barter arrangement with the Colombian guerrilla group FARC, organized mortar attacks on police stations, ordered stores all over the city to close as a show of authority, and continued to run his operation and arrange hits on rivals even after he was jailed, thanks to his access to cell phones smuggled into his prison cell. His story might have been even more interesting—and certainly more significant—than Nem’s, had he been willing to talk.

Life in the favelas was never as idyl-

lic as portrayed in the 1959 fi lm Black Orpheus, which won both an Oscar and a Golden Palm at Cannes and fi rst brought Rio’s favelas to global

David Alan Harvey/Magnum Photos

Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio

by Misha Glenny.

Knopf, 293 pp., $27.95

The New York Review

Go back and explain that we want them to arrest him!” But the guys explained that the officers wanted 10,000 reals to arrest the rapist.

“What sort of a world are we living in,” Nem asks . . . despairingly, “when you have to pay the cops to arrest criminals?”

Yet Glenny gives little sense of how conflicts among the various police forces and drug factions were perceived by the majority of Rio’s population.

The middle class is largely absent from his account of “the battle for Rio,” and when its members do appear, they are usually pampered youth climbing the hills to buy drugs or their affluent parents who hire favela residents as maids, nannies, cooks, chauffeurs, and gardeners, while apparently largely

“safety procedures not because they were unusual but because they were so familiar.” Such precautions, she writes, were absorbed almost automatically by residents on the asphalt, and “as much a part of life in the city as the profile of Cristo” at the top of Corcovado mountain. Recalling the process by which life in Rio became so full of “dont’s,” she writes: I’d forget these commandments during my absences and then get chided upon my return: Don’t talk on your cell phone in public, don’t wear that watch, don’t wear that ring, don’t go out alone at this hour, don’t open the window, don’t stop at the light, don’t forget to lock the doors. You’re taking the bus, are you crazy?. . . I was even scolded by a cabdriver once for climbing into his car without checking his face and his registration. Don’t flag a taxi in the street, he told me, call for one.

Miramax/Everett Collection

tried to negotiate Nem’s surrender before he was arrested. One investigator is a Buddhist who quotes Michel Foucault and believes that “some form of military control in slums was probably established by the ruling class in order to ensure that their inhabitants did not develop political or revolutionary aspirations.” In his off hours, another turns out to be “the lead singer of a heavy metal band that goes by the English name Unmasked Brains.”

The official who emerges as most sympathetic in Glenny’s account, however, is José Mariano Beltrame, secretary of public security for the state of Rio de Janeiro since 2007. In a memoir of his own that awaits translation into English, Todo Dia É Segunda-Feira (Every Day Is Monday), Beltrame gives a version of Nem’s rise and fall that dif-

A scene from the film City of God (2002), based on the novel by Paolo Lins

fers substantially from Glenny’s. But Beltrame grudgingly recognizes Nem as a shrewd adversary who was more dangerous than others because he had the intelligence and initiative not just to sell cocaine in Rocinha, but also to refine it there, which increased his profit margin and enabled him to suborn the police more efficiently. Nem had “a peculiar modus operandi,” Beltrame writes: While the Red Command imposed itself through force and the strength of its armaments, [Nem’s] Friends of Friends, as their name insinuates, had a strategy of massive spending on police corruption.

It was a faction more concerned about prevention. Since it had fewer “soldiers” and arms, it only went to war when attacked. Thanks to the collusion and support of bad agents, it was able to armor-plate its territories and make difficult any attempt to invade.

The perversity of the system is made clear in an anecdote that Nem tells Glenny. He had ordered his forces to turn over a rapist to the military police—in many favelas the drug boss would have taken justice into his own hands and subjected the offender to “the microwave,” in which a criminal is placed in a stack of tires, which are then doused with gasoline and set afire—only to be told that the police would not act unless they received a 10,000 real bribe, then worth about $6,000: “No,” said Nem, infuriated. “We don’t want them to release the guy.

May 12, 2016

indifferent to their employees’ plight.

Having spent so much time on the hillside, Glenny seems to have adopted the viewpoint of its residents. You don’t get the impression that he has similar sympathies for people on the asphalt streets below, who feel they are under permanent siege.

Throughout the book, for instance, there are references to the “smoke shops” where drugs are dealt and consumed. But we get no feel for what happens to those who develop drug habits and don’t have the money to pay for what they ingest. They have to turn to crime to pay off what they owe, and since many of the drug bosses, Nem included, punish petty crimes that addicts might commit against fellow residents of the favela, those in need of money descend the hillside to the asphalt and there carry out both simple assaults and the mass sweeps of beaches or tunnels known as arrastões, or “dragnets,” in which roving gangs use their force of numbers to steal everything in their path.

F

or the perspective of the middle class, readers will have to turn elsewhere, to a book like Juliana Barbassa’s recent Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink (2015). Brazilian by birth but raised largely in the Middle East, Barbassa in 2010 accepted an assignment as the Associated Press bureau chief in Rio because of the challenge implied in returning to a city she regarded as “something broken, abandoned, its decay more tragic because of its promise.” Once installed there, she becomes acutely aware of a whole battery of

Glenny also oversimplifies the importance of the media in framing Rio’s debate over how to deal with the favelas and their residents. It is true that the city’s main newspaper, O Globo, and the national television network affiliated with it have a long and inglorious history of spreading fear. Glenny only hints at it, but the “Cruzada São Sebastião,” a dank corner of the otherwise ritzy Leblon neighborhood that Nem sought to dominate, came into being in the 1950s amid a campaign that the newspaper led to raze low-level favelas coveted by the same real estate developers who were among the newspaper’s main advertisers. Once demolished, the favelas were transformed into high-rise developments and an exclusive club.

But canny drug bosses, including those in jail, have learned to use the press to their own advantage, and some news outlets, especially those directed at the lower classes, have portrayed the bosses with more nuance.

The same can be said of films like José Padilha’s two Elite Squad movies and his documentary Bus 174, which are as critical of police misconduct as of the drug lords. “The images transmitted by mass media are sufficiently pluralistic, differentiated and even divergent, besides having multiplied the number of participants in the public debate,” cautions Alba Zaruar in Um Século de Favela (A Century of Favela), probably the most comprehensive Portugueselanguage treatment of the favela phenomenon, “not to be reduced to a single prejudiced viewpoint of certain sectors of the population.”

In fact, because of its structure and style, Glenny’s Nemesis itself often reads like an English-language version of a type of true crime story that has long been popular in Brazil. Glenny mentions the outlaw called Lampião, a Robin Hood figure active from 1919 to 1938 in northeast Brazil, who is even today a favorite subject of chapbooks recited in that region and in the favelas.

But more modern examples, focused specifically on favelas and their crime bosses, abound. José Louzeiro’s Lúcio Flávio, o Passageiro da Agonia, which Hector Babenco made into a film in 1977, is one precursor of such stories,

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63

and Lins’s City of God, whose film version became a worldwide success in 2002 and has done much to shape Rio’s international image, is another.

An even more recent example, not yet translated into English, is Caco Barcellos’s gripping Abusado, which, like Nemesis, focuses on the boss of a single Rio favela, Santa Marta. And though it is set in São Paulo, Drauzio Varella’s Estação Carandiru, also made into a film by Babenco, is equally revealing.

Glenny could also have made it clearer that a favela is not just a slum but a squatter settlement whose residents lack property rights—a point

brought up several times in Ben Penglase’s lively account of his time on the hillside, Living With Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life (2014). Rio de Janeiro and other large Brazilian cities are full of neighborhoods that are poor but whose residents own their own homes. That traditionally has not been the case in a favela, and while Glenny refers to houses being “bought” and “sold,” he does not mention that these transactions until recently did not have validity under Brazilian law. As a result, favela residents live in a permanent state of precariousness: the state can,

and often has—including in the recent preparations before the Olympics and the 2014 soccer World Cup—forcibly removed them from their homes.

Nemesis is a useful and readable introduction to the favela phenomenon, especially coming from a writer who acknowledges that he was struggling to learn the slangy Portuguese of the hillside as he was researching and reporting. But Nemesis is sprinkled with minor errors of fact, spelling, and geography. Brazil is a nation of states, for instance, not provinces, and Fortaleza is a city, not a state. Rio has nearly a dozen professional soccer teams, not

four, and the bossa nova first gained popularity outside of Brazil in the early 1960s, not the 1970s.

T

he most important recent initiative intended to break the power of the drug lords and reassert state control in the favelas is the UPP program, which Beltrame launched in 2010 with the intention of achieving those goals by the time the Olympics start this year.

Glenny gives a detailed account of the creation and actions of these Police Pacification Units and how they altered the balance of power in Rocinha and

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64

The New York Review

other large favelas. Specially recruited, trained, and segregated from the regular police, the UPP units were supplemented by Brazilian army and navy troops and equipment in a show of what he calls, with no irony intended, “shock and awe.”

That led to a kind of renaissance, or at least a respite from violence, in the favelas that were “pacified.” Morro da Babilônia, where much of Black Orpheus was filmed, had by the first years of this century become a stronghold of the Third Command, which in addition to controlling the drug trade also monopolized essential services like gas

for cooking. After the Third Command was driven out, hiking trails opened, as did restaurants, bars, hostels, and other tourist attractions, all of them taking advantage of the new peace and Babilônia’s privileged view of Copacabana and the Atlantic Ocean.

But with the Olympics looming, the UPP program now appears to have run out of steam. The city and state simply have not been able to train enough of the special police units to establish a permanent presence in each favela. As a result, the campaign has turned into a game of hide and seek: move into Cantagalo, and the Red Command will

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shift its leaders there to Borel, or vice versa. And in some favelas, the UPP forces seem to have slipped back into the bad habits typical of the other police forces: bribery, sexual exploitation, violence against residents.

The boss Nem, however, is not around to witness this firsthand, and won’t be going to any Olympic events. Though acquitted in July of charges stemming from activities in Cruzada São Sebastião, he has been sentenced to nearly fifty years on other charges and is now far from Rio in the maximum security prison where Glenny interviewed him.

Meanwhile, back in Rocinha, aspirants

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65

Van Dyck: ‘The Great Power of Execution’ James Fenton

The last words of the dying painter Thomas Gainsborough in 1788—“We are all going to Heaven, and Vandyke is of the party”—serve as a reminder of the enduring presence of Anthony Van Dyck in the world of English portraiture during the centuries after his death. A Flemish protégé of Rubens, born in 1599, he had precocious success in Antwerp before making the great and necessary trip to Italy, where he paid particular attention to Venetian art, especially that of Titian. He made his base in Genoa, where, over a century later, in 1780, a guidebook estimated that there were still visible, in the palaces and churches of the city, no fewer than ninety-nine paintings by Van Dyck, of which seventy-two were portraits.

Antwerp bore him, Genoa raised him to his preeminence as a portraitist of the nobility, but it was in England, at the court of Charles I, that he achieved the most extraordinary monopoly on the imagination of posterity. For it is impossible to think of Charles and his wife Henrietta Maria, and the great figures of his court, without seeing them as Van Dyck portrayed them. And this portrayal has an unmistakable tinge of advocacy. It was hard for those born after to look on Charles’s noble features without thinking of his beheading as a form of martyrdom: As I was going past Charing Cross I saw a black man upon a black horse.

They told me it was Charles the First.

My God, I thought my heart would burst.

The anonymous nursery rhyme’s response to Hubert le Sueur’s bronze equestrian statue of 1633 (still on the south side of Trafalgar Square, where the king looks down Whitehall toward the place of his execution) has sometimes been taken to be a satire.

But it is entirely plausible as a record of genuine, abiding shock at the killing of the king. In the same spirit, Van Dyck’s images of Charles were copied endlessly. They turn up in cottages and in stately homes. The huge equestrian portrait depicting the king with his riding master, M. de St. Antoine, which is in the Royal Collection, became familiar recently to millions of television watchers: a copy hangs above the breakfast table in Downton Abbey (Highclere Castle in real life).

But they hang in numerous other great houses as well.

This success in promulgating his own image (like a Roman emperor, or like the French Sun King) belonged not only to Charles but also to his righthand man, whom Charles was forced to 66

excell’d all the World in that great falls carelessly in his Lap by the betray: Thomas Wentworth, First Earl Branch of Art, And being well other, which most unaffectedly of Strafford. Beheaded in 1641, the year stor’d with the Works of the greatgathers up his Rochet [linen vestof Van Dyck’s own premature death, est Masters, whether Paintings, or ment], which is painted beautiWentworth seems to turn a particuDrawings, Here being moreover fully, but keeps down so as not to larly piercing gaze at us, a look of anger the finest Living Models, as well break the Harmony. His Face has and alarm. Here’s another figure from as the greatest Encouragement, a Force beyond anything I ever our imagined history. I grew up in the This may justly be esteem’d as a saw, and a Wisdom and Solidity village of Wentworth, where the halfComplete, and the Best School for as great as Raffaele’s but vastly ruined old church contained a monuFace-Painting Now in the World. more Gentile. ment to Thomas Wentworth, and on Indeed it must be confess’d the that monument, as I recall, was WentBy implication, this excludes from Difference of the Subjects contribworth’s own helmet—though it seemed consideration not only Holbein, but utes something to this Advantage far too small for a man. But as I looked on the side of Van up at the helmet I was Dyck. The Colourreminded of what I had ing is true Flesh and been told could be seen Blood, Bright, and at night in Wentworth Transparent; RafWoodhouse nearby: faele’s is of a Brown the figure of Thomas Tinct and something Wentworth, First Earl Thick, at least comof Strafford, walking pared with this. His down the staircase, Scarlet is very Rich with his head tucked and Clear, but serves under his arm. nevertheless to set off The king and his the Face, ’tis so well court, the doomed Cavmanag’d. The Picture aliers of the future civil is enrich’d with things war, men and women of lying upon the Table, great power and wealth which unite with and almost above all, the Cardinal’s Robes, in the eyes of posterity, and Flesh, and make incomparable style— together the most the broad flat collars, pleasing Harmony the lustrous silks or imagineable. satins, the magnificent soft leather boots of the This is impressively men—a style that lived remembered. A cenon through the eightury later, after the fall teenth and nineteenth of Napoleon, the porcenturies. It lived on traitist James Norththrough the work of artcote discussed with ists like Gainsborough, fellow painter James whose painting of the Ward the following Blue Boy is an exercise ticklish question: in the Van Dyck style.

And the Blue Boy lived If Titian, Vandyke, on in our era: it became and Sir Joshua a jigsaw puzzle, a bis[Reynolds] had all cuit tin, a do-it-yourself been alive at the tapestry kit, a song.

Anthony Van Dyck: Mary, Lady Van Dyke, née Ruthven, circa 1640 same time, I wonder Meanwhile Van Dyck which of them would himself became both also the whole native tradition of porhave painted the best portrait of a noun and a verb—a kind of beard, a traiture (including beloved miniaturBonaparte! It is dreadfully diffibrown pigment, a flat collar with deepists such as Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac cult to decide. Now Titian would cut points . . .

Oliver). Richardson admired Holbein have given him a grandeur borderand owned work by him, but he probing on the terrible; Vandyke, an hat a foreign artist could come to ably thought of his portraiture as comelegance bordering on dandyism; London and monopolize an era may ing into a different category. The art Sir Joshua would have lost none sound surprising. But it is not surprisVan Dyck introduced to England was of the sweetness of his character. ing. It had happened before. Hans Holportraiture in the tradition of Titian Upon the whole, Titian, I think, bein the Younger, born in Augsburg in and Raphael. This remained the livwould be my choice.

Germany a century before Van Dyck, ing idiom, well into the nineteenth trained in Basel in Switzerland, came century. pon the whole, it seems, Titian to London, and stayed to paint Henry We can tell very clearly what it was is going to win in these games of VIII and various of his wives and other that the English painters saw in Van comparison, although Van Dyck is family members, and to draw a large Dyck (and what sometimes disapalways of the company, always in the number of the members of the court. pointed them), because they have told top echelon. And the quality being Once again, one cannot think of the era us. Here is Jonathan Richardson the valued most by Northcote is a kind without in some sense seeing it through Younger, in Florence, making his disof realistic impact bordering on the Holbein’s eyes. The difference is that covery of the portrait of Cardinal Benuncanny: Holbein’s style did not remain as an intivoglio, the star exhibit at the Frick’s spiration to later generations of paintterrific new show: When any stupendous work of ers. It was eclipsed by that of Van Dyck. antiquity remains with us—say a Jonathan Richardson the Elder, porI never saw anything like it. I building or a bridge—the common trait painter and art theorist, wrote in look’d upon it two Hours, and people cannot account for it, and 1715: came back twenty times to they say it was erected by the devil. look upon it again. He sits in an Now I feel this same thing in reWhen Van-Dyck came Hither, he Elbow Chair with one of his Elgard to the works of Titian;—they brought Face-Painting to Us; ever bows upon the Arm of the Chair seem to me as if painted by a devil, since which time (that is, for above and his Hand (the most Beautior at any rate from inspiration; fourscore Years) England has ful and Graceful in the World) Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture an exhibition at the Frick Collection, New York City, March 2–June 5, 2016.

Catalog of the exhibition

by Stijn Alsteens and Adam Eaker.

The Frick Collection/ Yale University Press, 307 pp., $65.00; $45.00 (paper)

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U

The New York Review

Northcote, too, had been to the Pitti Palace and stood before the portrait of Cardinal Bentivoglio, which was hung beside Titian’s portrait of Cardinal Ippolito dei Medici in Hungarian dress, and you have no idea how like a mere drawing Vandyke’s looked to me when I cast my eyes from one to the other; and yet it is one of Vandyke’s most powerful works!

It suffered sadly from its powerful neighbour, and Vandyke would have felt this keenly if he had seen it in the Palace Pitti under the circumstances that I did. But, then, nothing will stand against Titian!

Vandyke, for instance, whose great power of execution enabled him to avoid lininess. . . .

have in the end been unable to repress brilliant and highly motivated students.

Lininess (though not, I think, dry lininess) might be used to describe the technique of Holbein, where the precision and elegance of the line account for a great deal of the effect of the painting, and where the preparatory drawings for the portraits bear a close relationship to the paintings.

What counts with Van Dyck is not so much the line as the brushstroke—it is a different kind of precision, a precision of effect. Van Dyck possessed this from an early age—it is no doubt what Northcote refers to as his “great power of execution.”

As for the preparatory drawings, it seems often to have been the case that

The allusion to Titian’s alleged treatment of Tintoretto is perhaps enough to make us suspect that the story of Rubens’s jealousy of Van Dyck is a topos, a traditional tale redeployed to suit the circumstances. It did not convince Horace Walpole for one minute. “If Rubens had been jealous of Vandyck,” he asked, “would he, as all their biographers agree he did, persuade him to visit Italy, whence himself had drawn his greatest lights?” And Walpole continues with a marvelously tart observation: “Addison did not advise Pope to translate Homer, but assisted Tickell in a rival translation.” Jealousy, in other words, is not generous.

One can imagine, though, that Van Dyck’s was a personality that was at its happiest when it had achieved the status it craved—that of being the leading figure of his circle, the primus inter pares. Bellori gives us a sense of this when describing Van Dyck’s ill reception among the Flemish painters in Rome. Van Dyck’s manners, he tells us,

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

I cannot account for them; Vandyke’s things don’t produce that effect upon me at all, for his portraits are like beautifully- executed models standing up in glass cases, such as are to be see in Westminster Abbey [he is referring to the wax funeral effigies]. But Titian’s have a frightful look of life about them, and it is this which astonishes me.

Northcote, whose conversation was so valued by his contemporaries that two writers—Ward and William Hazlitt—took care to record it at length, is not always consistent in these comparisons, but he reveals some underlying criteria. He says at one point that Van Dyck’s portraits “look too much like the members of one family”; elsewhere he finds this fault in Titian: I am afraid to think it, yet I cannot help thinking sometimes, that Titian was a mannerist, for his portraits, though identity itself in many respects, yet have all the same solemn air—they partake of his own sternness of character.

Now to get rid of self is the great thing to be aimed at, and this, in my opinion, Titian did not quite manage to accomplish. Raphael managed it better, but no man did it as well as Shakespeare, which makes the miraculous part of his character.

So the first quality Northcote was looking for in a painter was a capacity for self- effacement in the manner of Shakespeare—the Romantic, inscrutable Shakespeare evoked in Matthew Arnold’s later sonnet (“Others abide our question. Thou art free”). In some respects, he thought that Van Dyck’s paintings were the finest in the world— “they are exquisite in execution, and cleanness of color, and are perhaps the best models to learn how to work from”—but there is too much of the artist himself in them: “The airs and attitudes of Vandyke’s sitters are not theirs, but his own.”

In execution, the thing to be avoided, Northcote thought, was excessive linearity or what he called “lininess”: Men may go to the same place by different roads. Nothing can surely be more unlike than the manner of Titian and that of Vandyke, and yet the end they both had in view was the same. Now, if I were to proceed on Vandyke’s method of making outlines, I should produce nothing but dry lininess, I should never obtain a rich effect in my pictures; but, still, the method may suit another painter very well, as it did May 12, 2016

Anthony Van Dyck: Self-Portrait (detail), circa 1627–1635

they concerned themselves with the sitter’s pose, rather than with the likeness of the face. As a mature artist, Van Dyck preferred to paint the features directly onto the canvas, working first in monochrome to create a sketch that would, in due course, disappear under paint. If a large-scale composition made this approach inconvenient, he might first paint oil sketches of individual heads. Two such sketches are on display at the Frick. They are lively and delightful and very much to the modern taste. But their quality has only recently been recognized. They had usually been overpainted in order to make them appear like finished portraits.

According

to his early biographer, G. P. Bellori, it was Rubens who, having first trained and employed Van Dyck as his assistant and copyist, pointed the young man in the direction of portraiture: It occurred to Rubens that his disciple was well on the way to usurping his fame as an artist, and that in a brief space of time his reputation would be placed in doubt.

And so, being very astute, he took his opportunity from the fact that Anthony had painted several portraits, and, praising them enthusiastically, proposed him in his place to anyone who came to ask for such pictures, in order to take him away from history painting. For the very same reason Titian—even more harshly—dismissed Tintoretto from his house; and many other artists who have followed a similar course

were more those of an aristocrat than a common man, and he was conspicuous for the richness of his dress and the distinction of his appearance, having been accustomed to consort with noblemen while a pupil of Rubens; and being naturally elegant and eager to make a name for himself, he would wear fine fabrics, hats with feathers and bands, and chains of gold across his chest, and he maintained a retinue of servants. Thus, imitating the splendor of Zeuxis, he attracted the attention of all who saw him.

This conduct, which should have recommended him to the Flemish painters who lived in Rome, in fact stirred up against him the greatest resentment and hatred. For they were accustomed at that time to live cheerfully together, and it was their practice, when one of them was newly arrived in Rome, to take him to supper at an inn and give him a nickname by which he was afterwards known.

Van Dyck refused to go along with this, and was criticized for his pride and contempt for his fellows. Hence the decision, according to Bellori, to base himself in Genoa rather than Rome.

One can see that there might be something in Northcote’s observation, cited above, that the airs and attitudes of Van Dyck’s sitters are not theirs, but his own. He aimed for magnificence, like Rubens. He dressed magnificently and, as Bellori describes his house in London, he lived like a prince, “keeping servants, carriages, horses, musicians, singers, and clowns, who entertained all the dignitaries, knights, and ladies who visited his house every day.” He employed models to pose in the borrowed costumes of his sitters, and he had assistants to work up those parts of the portraits to which, in due course, he would put the finishing touches. It must have been an efficient system. During the London years, from 1632 until Van Dyck’s death in 1641, he painted more than 260 portraits that have survived, and, as Stijn Alsteens reminds us in the Frick catalog, many more that are now lost.

I

n 1999, Antwerp and London combined to mount an exhibition of Van Dyck’s paintings, both portraits and religious works. In London, it effortlessly filled the grand suite of the Royal Academy, and I remember vividly, on completing the circuit, looking back at the great tall rooms and thinking how well the generous architecture showed off the grandeur of the canvases. To an extent, the scale of the portraits reflects the elevated ranks of the sitters.

The Frick’s beautiful early portraits of Frans Snyders and his wife are suitable both in scale and in idiom for an Antwerp painter of the time, and for his domestic space: they do not offend against the sumptuary conventions of the day. The Genoese full-length portraits, destined for palaces, develop their own sense of a palatial architecture. The largest of the English portrait groups, at Wilton House, could never have traveled. But the Frick, whose exhibition space is well known to be limited, was working against the odds in choosing to mount a Van Dyck show. It was pushing the envelope.

And the envelope consented to be pushed. Unlike in the 1999 exhibiton, the choice of work is confined to portraiture—the religious paintings (Van Dyck was a devout Catholic) are simply not addressed. But this concentration opens up a whole field of interest not investigated in 1999: the drawings and other works on paper. For although, as already said, Van Dyck seems to have avoided the need for preparatory portrait drawings of faces, when he could do so, his was the kind of talent, the kind of genius, that could turn its hand to whatever seemed necessary: there are (though obviously not in this show) beautiful landscape and plant studies, and even a few watercolors, among his oeuvre.

At the Frick, two rooms on the main floor are devoted to the full-sized portraits. In the basement are smaller paintings, including three precocious self-portraits, and drawings, grisailles, and etchings from a project that is really Van Dyck’s memorial to the Antwerp of his day, known as the Iconographie. This was a loose collection of portraits of painters, collectors, intellectuals, princes, and generals that were made to be engraved. There is something of a prejudice today against engraving as an art. It is at one remove from the work of the artist’s own hand, whether that work was an etching or a drawing or one of these fascinating paintings en grisaille, which come from the collection of Peter Lely, Van Dyck’s successor artist in Restoration London.

Van Dyck made very few etchings, but they are of extraordinary quality, especially when seen in their earlier states. The self-portrait, the head of Snyders, the drawing and the etching of Pieter Breughel the Younger—you realize what Van Dyck would have done had he chosen to pursue this kind of work. There is much that he didn’t do—he didn’t have a late style, for instance; he didn’t live long enough, dying at forty-two. One feels though that there was nothing he could not have done, had the occasion arisen.

Stijn Alsteens and Adam Eaker, both from the Metropolitan Museum, put together the exhibition and its substantial catalog, to which they both contribute excellent essays. One learns a lot. One has a good time.

67

The ‘Darkness and Radiance’ of the Tale Patricia Storace

The Winter’s Tale

by William Shakespeare, directed by Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh, at the Garrick Theatre, London, October 17, 2015–January 16, 2016 Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time, the inaugural volume of what Hogarth Press is calling, borrowing the language of recording studios, “cover versions” of Shakespeare’s plays, is a retelling of the late romance The Winter’s Tale, first performed at the Globe and then before King James I at court in 1611. The Winter’s Tale is, famously, a play that begins as tragedy, and transforms itself at the very end of its third act, with the intervention of Time itself, into another play altogether, neither tragedy nor comedy, but a miraculous fusion of both, of meeting simultaneously with “things dying” and “things newborn.” The structure of the play corresponds organically with the plot, resolved through the finding of a lost daughter.

The final act is nothing so simple as a reversal of the previous action; it is as if the fourth act is the child of the previous play, both echoing and changing what has happened before. Franz Schubert, in his manuscript “My Dream,” a kind of embryonic vision of his song cycle Die Winterreise, uncannily describes the effect of this earlier winter’s tale: “Whenever I tried to sing of love, it turned to pain.

And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love.”

In the first part of The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, the king of Sicily, after a festive nine-month visit of his beloved boyhood friend, Polixenes, the king of Bohemia, is overcome by the conviction that his friend’s and his queen Hermione’s affection for each other, which he himself has encouraged, is evidence that they are lovers, that the child she is carrying is Polixenes’s bastard, and that they are plotting together to overthrow him. He orders a trusted councillor to murder Polixenes, separates Hermione from Mamillius, their son and heir, and imprisons her, awaiting a judgment of her innocence from Apollo’s oracle.

Hermione gives birth prematurely to a daughter, whom Leontes orders exposed on the wild shores of Bohemia, against the impassioned advice of Paulina, another trusted courtier.

Although the oracle declares the queen’s unequivocal innocence and warns that the lost daughter must be found to preserve the kingdom, Leontes overrules it. Before the trial can proceed, a messenger announces the death of Mamillius, broken by his father’s incomprehensible and sudden violence toward his mother. Hermione herself falls dead on hearing the news.

In the second part of the play, Polixenes’s son, Florizel, the Bohemian prince, has met and fallen in love with the Sicilian princess, Perdita, brought 68

up as a shepherd’s child, with no knowledge of her heritage. When Polixenes discovers the romance, he becomes the implacable tyrant in his turn, threatening to kill Perdita and disinherit Florizel.

The couple flee to Sicily, where Leontes has spent the last sixteen years in formal penitence. There, Perdita’s true identity is revealed at last, and Paulina invites the reunited families to see a remarkable statue of the late queen. It is of course the living queen, who has been sheltered under Paulina’s protection, surviving to see her daughter restored to her and the oracle fulfilled.

and son who run a bayou country music club and restaurant called the Fleece, in an imaginary Louisiana town called New Bohemia—these are of course the Shepherds, the doubles of the original Bohemian shepherd father and son.

Autolycus, a peddler and pickpocket in the original and perhaps the most successful crossover of all, is a shady used car dealer, selling his dubious wares from a shop called “Autos Like Us.” The action of Winterson’s novel shadows the plot of Shakespeare’s play; every chapter’s title is drawn from his lines, and occasionally fragments of the verse are quoted. When the map-

the police of the baby’s kidnapping, why both Leo and Xeno wouldn’t have been thoroughly questioned, and bulletins and pictures with the baby’s name posted on the Internet. Why wouldn’t Leo have suffered any legal consequences? There is no mystery about the child’s name in this version, so it jars that Polixenes’s double, Xeno, doesn’t recognize her distinctive name when the young woman introduces herself to him as Perdita. Pauline has been described as a woman who’s lived for her career, with no time for relationships, yet she is suddenly addressed as “Mrs. Levy” near the book’s close, though we have never glimpsed a husband. And it seems bizarre that the choice of music in a black- owned Louisiana bayou country bar would include James Taylor and Bette Midler but not a trace of zydeco. Implausibly, Perdita’s brother Milo, for whose death her father is responsible, is never mentioned during the course of the reunion.

Paradoxically, the characters don’t gain in reality by being set in the present; nor can they escape the imprisoning rhetoric of pop psychology with which they describe one another, with its repertoire of commitment phobias, control freaks, disconnects, “ways of doing family,” and Alpha Males. These characters cannot move freely within language; neither fluent in the past, nor inventive in their present idiom, they lose the mystery and dazzling fluidity that is unique to The Winter’s Tale, which is not set in the past or the present or the future, but in the heart of time itself.

Winterson might fruitfully have found a more improvisational relation to the play—by having Time tell the story, for instance—or by narrating the tale herself. It is striking that the closing pages of the book are the most captivating, when she does precisely that, describing in her own voice her passion for the play and its deep autobiographical meaning for her. To tell the tale, as she does, as a kind of parallel text translation from the original means that the reader can never escape constant comparison of the two, so that we are always in an impoverished relation to the masterpiece itself, and we end up reading in a state of insomnia rather than entering the dream.

Johan Persson

The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold

by Jeanette Winterson.

Hogarth Shakespeare, 273 pp., $25.00

Miranda Raison as Hermione and Kenneth Branagh as Leontes in Branagh’s and Rob Ashford’s production of The Winter’s Tale at the Garrick Theatre, London, 2015

Jeanette

Winterson has anchored her retelling in the twenty-first century, with a decor of iPads, pink Fiats, therapy, and hedge funds. Winterson charms with her playful translation of the cast from the courts of Sicily and Bohemia into our own quotidian life.

King Leontes is Leo, an “Alpha Male” capitalist billionaire CEO of a hedge fund called Sicilia, while the original’s courtier, Paulina, is now Pauline, an MBA manager of the fund and Leo’s right hand in the business. Hermione, Sicily’s queen, has become MiMi, a celebrity chanteuse, the daughter of a Russian diplomat, brought up in Paris.

She is delightfully introduced to us through a wonderfully convincing facsimile Wikipedia page, underscoring how much this biographical format has become a part of the mental structure of the age.

Polixenes, the suspected lover of Hermione in the play, is now Xeno, Leo’s boyhood friend, a gay designer of computer games. The suspicious Leo has a webcam set up in his wife’s bedroom; a few images serve to confirm his already fabricated conviction of the infidelity of his wife and friend, and as in the play, inflame his fantasy that both the expected baby and Milo, the couple’s older son, are bastards. He tries unsuccessfully to kill Xeno, viciously rapes the pregnant MiMi, and pays for his infant daughter Perdita to be abducted, intending to have her delivered to her imagined father. The scheme goes awry when Leo’s agent is killed and Perdita is rescued by a black father

ping of one world onto another works seamlessly, the effect can be breathtaking, as in the scene when the Shepherds change the flat tire of the car that had carried the abducted baby. The moment is written with a magical stillness and assurance, the ancient image of the turning wheel of fortune delicately superimposed onto the familiar task of changing a tire. But despite the rewards of images like this, in attempting to find close equivalents that double the play’s characters and settings in the present, Winterson has chosen an almost impossible narrative strategy out of the many alternatives available.

Because the characters have to hew so closely to their prototypes (even their names are for the most part shortened versions of the Shakespearean personae), they function less as characters than as symbols of their originals.

The twenty-first- century Perdita and Florizel are generic, self- consciously adorable young lovers, asking each other inane questions: “Do you like stars?” “Do you like the ocean?” Paulina, now Pauline, is a dated stand-up comedy routine Jew, a sort of formulaic Yiddish-speaking Mama Shylock, with never a moral uncertainty about her heart of gold. The play’s characters are nuanced because we witness them making suspenseful moral choices; the novel’s characters are enacting their fates, already set in the pattern of the ancestral play.

The ultra-modern setting emphasizes any lack of continuity or plausibility.

It’s a puzzle, since MiMi has notified

K

enneth Branagh and his codirector Rob Ashford, by contrast, in using all the resources of The Winter’s Tale’s native medium of theater, were able to make full use of the oceanic presence of time in the play, time that is only in one aspect sequential or cyclical. In this London production, which closed in January and was streamed in some British theaters, seasons were emotional as well as natural; the dead could be living, the living could be dead, an adult could be born, the past and the present could coexist in a missing child, who could bring her parents to life.

Branagh and the company, of course, accomplished this partly through the advantage of the verse, language deliberately composed, with its fluid syntax The New York Review

and rhythmic emphases, to move fluently and unconventionally through time and space. And the actors (with Branagh playing Leontes) had the advantage of theater’s particular relationship to time; physically present actors are engaged in a complex transaction between the immediate moment and memory. They are, in a sense, living what they remember—the parts they had memorized. There was a consciousness, too, both in the audience and, subtly, within the performances, of the revolutions of time embodied in the players—Judi Dench, now Paulina, had played both Perdita and Hermione in previous productions.

From the outset, Branagh’s production played wittily with anachronism. Though Leontes’s court was a vaguely Scandinavian, late-nineteenthcentury household at Christmastime, the play opened with home movies of the two kings’ idyllic shared boyhood, a technology that seemed too advanced for the period. Even if this was an Edwardian court, it would be a stretch to have footage of these mature kings’ childhood years. But Time is sovereign in The Winter’s Tale, and it is Time’s prerogative to anticipate, to move backward, forward, or to pause altogether. Time was a pervasive presence in this production, not only as represented by Judi Dench in Act IV, but in technology, in the body, seen in Hermione’s pregnant “goodly bulk,” in an old friendship or new love, or an instant of violence that couldn’t be retracted, with “power/to o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour/to plant and o’erwhelm custom.”

Time’s power was visible in the Christmas presents these grown-up kings gave each other—skates and a snow globe—toys belonging to the two boys they still wanted to be. The skates would quickly add evidence to Leontes’s foregone certainty of his wife’s treachery, when he caught a glimpse of her skating with his friend, in the natural embrace of paired skaters. Branagh’s Leontes was himself an anachronism—a man who had not matured. He spent so much time on the floor with his son Mamillius it was as if he wanted to change places. And in his interactions with Miranda Raison’s Hermione, he was a bit awkward and physically ill at ease, like a teenager trying to overcome the fear that he is not his girlfriend’s equal. This was reinforced by his flash of resentful fury that Hermione has persuaded his closest friend to prolong his visit, when “at my request he would not.”

Raison played her effortlessly graceful Hermione, delicately and maddeningly, as his superior—better born, as the daughter of the emperor of Russia, a more practiced and successful diplomat, the generosity of her hospitality spontaneous and truly felt. (This quality as a hostess was wonderfully evoked in the fourth act sheep-shearing, with Jessie Buckley’s Perdita, true daughter of her mother, brimming over with joy in her feast, and uncontainable, loving, abundant concern for her guests.)

Branagh’s frustrated, outraged “Shall I be heard?” after Her mione speaks in the trial scene, while the attention of the court is riveted on her, suggested that this was the latest of many occasions when the queen overshadowed the king, even in her disgrace.

This Leontes’s jealousy was more complex than that implied by the May 12, 2016

usual focus on sexual jealousy alone.

Branagh’s jealousy metastasized, though the serpentine ambiguity of the dialogue between his wife and friend— as when Hermione says, “Th’ offences we have made you do we’ll answer, /If you first sinned with us, and that with us/you did continue fault”—leaves room for a response of either doubt or trust. Branagh showed us, though, how quickly Leontes begins to will what he imagines. He is jealous not only of what Polixenes and Hermione may have done, but also of what she is. He wants to recreate her—as his moral inferior, no longer his wife, but his prisoner. He is jealous of his own son’s childhood, and takes it from him.

The ambiguities of the play are at work not only in the perception of falsehood, but of truth, which is equally difficult to see clearly. Hermione’s assertion “A lady’s ‘verily’’s/as potent as a lord’s,” embedded in her playfully charming speech persuading Polixenes to stay longer, might sound like courtly gallantry, but is the plain truth, a truth embodied by Paulina, and Perdita, too.

There is a dark ironic comedy flickering in the tragic acts of The Winter’s Tale, in which women are accused of being by nature “slippery,” deceitful, incapable by nature of honesty, whereas it is overwhelmingly the men—Leontes, Polixenes, the master thief Autolycus, who are lying and faithless. (John Dagleish played a wonderful Autolycus, so adept in his trickery that he at last managed the supreme feat of deceiving himself.)

And what happens when a woman tries to tell the truth? When the gods confirm that Hermione has been truthful, her husband insists that the gods themselves are liars. When Paulina speaks the truth to the king, he calls her a witch and threatens to have her burned at the stake, though here every woman accused of falsehood and witchcraft—Hermione, Paulina, and Perdita—is in collaboration with divine forces. This might have been a risky ambiguity to set before King James I, who along with his patronage of Bible translation was also the author of Daimonologie, a treatise on the nature of witches, with guidance on how to recognize them. James was deeply preoccupied by witchcraft, and was personally involved in the witch trial of a midwife named Agnes Sampson, who confessed under torture and was executed.

Along

with Leontes, the female characters most intimate with him— Raison’s Hermione and Judi Dench’s superb Paulina—were freshly conceived in a way that added new dimensions to the play. Centuries of actresses playing these characters have been subject to a kind of prescriptive criticism that describes the sort of ideal women they ought to be. Here is an example from the New York Albion’s account of Amelia Warner’s 1851 Hermione, in a production directed by William Burton, the publishing partner with Edgar Allan Poe of The Gentleman’s Magazine. Warner is praised for her “exhibition of physical weakness and moral power, of injured innocence and gentlest submission to the hard decrees of fate” in the trial scene.

By contrast, there was nothing submissive in Miranda Raison’s trial scene.

We could at last see that Hermione is a cousin to Portia, a great and observant

lawyer, artfully revealing to the court the mechanisms of the show trial this is. Though telling the truth puts her utterly at risk, she lucidly defends not just her personal innocence but, accused of conspiracy, her political integrity and her honor as a human being in addition to her conduct as a wife. She is a study of vulnerability and power, corresponding to her husband’s amalgam of power and weakness. (The Albion critic makes Burton’s Autolycus, though, sound shockingly contemporary—“the very prototype of hedge financiers, the Barnum of the highways. . . . O, Wall Street, behold thy King.”)

The character of Paulina is often nervously measured: How much is she a scold, a termagant, a witch, a crone, though this is how Leontes characterizes her when his mind is at its most diseased? Judi Dench’s Paulina was responding to a matter of life and death; she neither enjoyed nor loathed her obligation; she was tireless in telling the truth. Her Paulina might have been modeled on Ida B. Wells or Florence Nightingale—not the sentimental lady with the lamp, but the indefatigable campaigner, the writer of five hundred letters setting out the medical and social arguments for sanitary boards in every Indian province. Like Nightingale described by her friend Colonel Yule, Dench’s Paulina “is worse than a Royal Commission to answer, and in the most gracious, charming manner possible, immediately finds out all I don’t know.”

This Winter’s Tale was marked by a flow of revelatory, swiftly passing, virtuosic moments; Dench and Branagh in act 3, when Paulina insists on showing the king his newborn daughter, suggested the history of the pair’s past relationship as well as their present antagonism. When Dench insisted her way into an audience with him, holding the baby, Branagh’s wry recognition that no one could have stopped her (“I knew she would”) and Dench’s testing attempt to restore the king’s sense of humor, assuring him that the baby resembles him so much “’tis the worse,” captured a flash of affection and respect between old friends who have wrangled over policy before and momentarily remember coming to less tragic resolutions. Michael Pennington’s Antigonus was another exquisite sketch, of a man not weak in relation to his wife, as he is accused, but in relation to his king.* Another small marvel was Branagh’s first appearance in act 4, when, with his back to the audience, he managed to communicate through his posture alone years of endurance, pain, solitude, and a dignity Leontes never achieved in his previous scenes.

The sparkling charm of the opening Christmas scene, the joyfully carnal Bohemian pastoral scene, and Patrick Doyle’s engaging accompanying songs should not distract from how these performances, along with the fresh complexity of Branagh’s Leontes, Dench’s Paulina, and Raison’s Hermione, made this version a landmark production of the play in all its inseparable darkness and radiance. We can only hope that a record of it will be available and that it can be revived. *Michael Pennington is also the author of a number of delightful and intimate books about Shakespeare, written from his experience as both actor and director.

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—Philip Pullman The Magic Pudding is a pie, except when it’s something else, like a steak, or a jam donut, or an apple dumpling, or whatever its owner wants it to be. And it never runs out. No matter how many slices you cut, there’s always something left over. It’s magic. But the Magic Pudding is also alive. It walks and it talks and it’s got a personality like no other.

So Bunyip Bluegum (the koala bear) finds out when he joins Barnacle Bill (the sailor) and Sam Sawnoff (the penguin bold) as members of the Noble Society of Pudding Owners. Wild and woolly, funny and outrageously fun, The Magic Pudding stands somewhere between Alice in Wonderland and The Stinky Cheese Man as one of the craziest books ever written for young readers.

An Episode of Sparrows Rumer Godden Paperback and e-book Ages 10 and up On sale May 10th A much loved English novel reminiscent of The Secret Garden Someone has dug up the private garden in the square and taken buckets of dirt, and Angela Chesney of the Garden Committee is sure that a local gang of boys must be to blame. But Angela’s sister Olivia wonders why the neighborhood children—the sparrows—have to be locked out of the garden. Don’t they have a right to enjoy the place?

But neither Angela nor Olivia has any idea what sent the neighborhood waif Lovejoy Mason and her few friends in search of good, garden earth. Still less do they imagine where their investigation of the incident will lead them.

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The Triumph of Piero Willibald Sauerländer

A truly unfortunate life is the lot of those who pursue their studies in order to be of use to others and promulgate their own fame, but because they fall ill and die, fail to complete the works they began. If they leave them in a state in which only little remains to be done, the incomplete works are snatched up by the impudence of those who attempt to conceal their jackass’s hide beneath the glorious pelt of a lion.

Vasari borrows a fable from Aesop to denounce the plagiarism to which Piero della Francesca fell victim.

Piero was one of those pioneering masters from the circle of Italian humanists who not only practiced their craft as architects and painters, but also wrote theoretical treatises reflecting on their work. We do not know exactly how many essays Piero wrote on mathematics and geometry—Vasari speaks of “many”—but only three have survived. The presumably early Trattato dell’abaco treats arithmetic and algebra. The late De prospectiva pingendi takes up the practical problems of perspective still being debated at the time.

Its first sentence is frequently quoted: “Painting contains three main principles, which we call drawing [disegno], measurement [commensuratio], and working with color [colorare].”

Piero’s pictures, invested with so much emotion by modern viewers, are based on a computational foundation of mathematics and solid geometry.

The famous Renaissance mathematician Luca Pacioli incorporated Piero’s explanation of solid geometry wordfor-word into his Summa de Arithmetica without attribution. It was certainly plagiarism, as Vasari charged, but it was also a compliment. The painter Piero was not just the conceiver but also the constructor of his works.

Although we do not know the exact date of his birth, 2016 is being celebrated as its six hundredth anniversary.

He was born in Sansepolcro, a small town in the upper Tiber Valley not far from Arezzo, sometime between 1415 and 1420. His father was a shoemaker.

He would have learned the fundamentals of mathematics in the local school, and when he was fifteen he took up painting. We can only speculate on his artistic training in Sansepolcro, and in fact his entire life and career are only sparsely documented, which has led to much wrangling in the scholarly literature.

In 1439 he is mentioned as a colleague of Domenico Veneziano in Florence, and in 1445 he signed a contract to paint an altarpiece for the Brotherhood of the Misericordia in Sansepolcro’s town hall. Thus this first documented commission came not from a prince or a monastery but from his fellow citizens. He would later work for the pope in Rome, for the noble house of d’Este in Ferrara, for the Malatesta family in Rimini, and for the famous Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino, making his 70

Easter message of death and resurrecthe main figures and the predominant major contribution to the splendor of tion has seldom been depicted with events. the early Renaissance in Italy. But he such overwhelming power. At the botIn the depiction of emotional agitanever settled in one of its great centers, tom, we see dead-tired guards asleep tion, emphatically recommended by instead returning again and again to beside the grave. They wear colorful aesthetic theories of the time, Piero is his hometown of Sansepolcro.

Roman armor and one leans his head, restrained. For him, it is gesture and Yet there is nothing provincial about with its coarse peasant features, against especially gaze that are most imporhis works. Quite the contrary: he the projecting edge of the sarcophagus tant. We encounter only one figure brought Italian—and especially Florlid. Our gaze is drawn down to them, who is emotional in the expressive entine—modernism into wider use and but then there is a dramatic shift of persense defined by the art historian Aby thereby lent it a unique and powerful spective: we raise our eyes and before Warburg: the mourning woman at the face. His polyptych for the Brotherus appears the figure of the resurrected burial of Adam who raises her arms hood of the Misericordia assembles figand opens her mouth in a ures of saints around the wail. The gracefulness Vacentral image of the Virsari praises in Piero is evigin of Mercy. All of them dent in the female figures stand against a gilt backsurrounding the Queen ground that is still quite of Sheba and the Empress medieval. But despite the Helen. Piero’s sensitive traditional sacred setting, feeling for light culmithe figures are powernates in the scene of the fully physical presences slumbering Constantine, dressed in robes whose where the dark of night is dramatic folds, reminiswonderfully illuminated cent of mountain gorges, by the heavenly messenwere obviously inspired by ger bringing the dream contemporary Florentine in which he is shown the painting, especially that of True Cross by an angel. his fellow artists Masaccio and Donatello.

And while the theme of ndividual portraits like the Virgin Mary spreadthose being painted in ing her protective cloak the Low Countries at that around the members of a time were not among the brotherhood is also from primary tasks of a painter the late Middle Ages of monumental public im(it can be found, for inages such as Piero. Nevstance, in late Gothic art ertheless, he did make in Germany), Piero treats striking portraits of the it from a new perspective. ruling princes he served Dressed in a luminous red in Rimini and Urbino. In robe, Mary towers like a the Tempio Malatestiano column over the other figin Rimini he painted Siures, her open cloak remigismondo Pandolfo Maniscent of an apse. Within latesta kneeling before his it kneel the praying mempatron, Saint Sigismund. bers of the brotherhood, The prince is dressed the men on one side and with courtly elegance and the women on the other, presented in pure profile. gazing up at their patronBehind him lie two greyess. Their costly garments hounds; a fortification boast resplendent colors erected by Sigismondo is Piero della Francesca: Virgin of Mercy, while a heavenly light ilthe center panel of the Misericordia Polyptych, 1445–1462 visible through a round lumines their faces, which window, and above him are probably portraits of shines his coat of arms—it is a genuChrist, clothed in a light pink garment, actual members. There is hardly anine official portrait. The architectural the wound in his side visible, and carother altarpiece where the old is so frame—fluted pilasters and a frieze— rying the Easter banner. To borrow the dramatically confronted by the new. is clearly inspired by the great architect title of a famous essay by Erwin PanNothing about this image of the Virgin and theoretician Leon Battista Alberti, ofsky, perspective here becomes “symis soft and sweet. Instead, it is quietly who designed the Tempio and whom bolic form.” austere.

Piero must have met in Rimini.

But let us turn to the most important The masterpiece among Piero’s porwork that has survived from Piero’s here is another, similarly cryptic traits of princes comes from Urbino: oeuvre, the frescos of the Legend of the image of Mary by Piero, the Madonna the double portrait of the condottiere True Cross in the church of San Frandel Parto for a chapel in Monterchi, the Federico da Montefeltro and his wife cesco in Arezzo. They were the donahometown of Piero’s mother. In a solBattista Sforza. It is a diptych that, tion of a rich family, the Bacci, and emn act of unveiling, two angels open when closed, shows the princely couple took a long time to be completed. Piero an enclosure made of precious fabric riding separate triumphal carts and joined the project in 1452 at the latest and lined with ermine. Within—and accompanied by secular and theologiand created one of the most imposing again standing upright and tall—is cal virtues, depicted as women. In the fresco cycles of the early Renaissance. the clearly pregnant Mary, this time distance, we can see a landscape probIn fourteen scenes he depicts—probdressed in blue. Her right hand points ably meant to indicate the pair’s terably following the text of the Legenda to the blessed burden in her womb. It ritories. When the panels are opened, Aurea—the Legend of the True Cross is hard to think of another image of the the same panorama appears, but now from the death of Adam to the Cross’s Virgin that includes a gesture of comas a background to the towering busts entrance into Jerusalem. Again it is parable symbolic weight, and it has atof Federico and Battista in profile. She perspective in its interplay with light tracted much speculation. is adorned with pearls and precious that gives the scenes their vivid presPiero’s use of perspective to drastones, but Federico is the dominant ence. He places his powerful figures matize a sacred theme reaches its clifigure. He wears a garment of purplishnear the front edge of the pictures, max in a fresco of the Resurrection in red devoid of any additional decoraso that in their statuesque physicality Sansepolcro. According to legend, the tion. The famous injury to the bridge of and colorful garments they move as if town was founded when a relic was his nose sharpens rather than detracts on a stage. Piero is a gripping narrator brought back from the Holy Land. The from his remarkable profile. This porwho never diverts our attention from Museo Civico, Sansepolcro/Erich Lessing/Art Resource

Giorgio Vasari, the father of art history, begins his biography of the painter Piero della Francesca with a sigh of reproach:

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The New York Review

trait conveys a strong image of a ruler in an environment both harsh and nobly humanistic.

Federico appears in another painting

by Piero, but now in the pious solemnity invoked by the subject of last things.

In the apse of a church whose interior again seems to be inspired by Alberti, Mary sits enthroned with her sleep ing son in her lap. She is attended by four angels, and a semicircle of saints

is assembled around her. It is probably the earliest example of the sacra conversazione altarpieces that became especially popular in Venetian painting.

Above the Virgin’s head, an ostrich egg hangs from the apex of the apse. It is a symbol of the Immaculate Conception and was also to be found on Federico’s coat of arms. In his shining armor he kneels in prayer before the Virgin, who for her part prays in intercession for his

eternal soul. This pious altarpiece was associated with Federico’s grave. Here, Piero is no longer the trail-blazing inventor of his earlier images of the Madonna or the powerful narrator of the Legend of the True Cross. This epitaph for his last and most important patron is in the muted style of his more mature work.

How will Piero della Francesca and his powerful but unemotional paint-

ings stand in the contemporary art scene? Let’s give the final word to the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, who wrote brilliantly about works of art.

According to legend, the aged, blind Piero was led around by the boy Marco di Longaro. Herbert commented, “Little Marco could not know that he was leading light by the hand.”

—Translated from the German

by David Dollenmayer

Was There Always an England?

Private Collection/Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images

Keith Thomas The English and Their History

by Robert Tombs.

Knopf, 1,024 pp., $45.00 At a time when the breakup of the United Kingdom seems ever more likely, any attempt at a history of England, separate from that of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, is bound to seem a political statement. To dwell on English achievements and English distinctiveness is to supply fodder for the growing number of those who defiantly fly the cross of St. George—an emblem of English soldiers since the thirteenth century—in their back gardens and see no reason why Scottish and Northern Irish members of Parliament should vote on measures affecting England alone. To emphasize that the English way of doing things has often differed radically from that of its Continental neighbors risks adding ammunition to the currently vociferous campaign to bring Britain out of the European Union.

The publisher’s blurb for this new thousand-page survey of English history from circa 600 AD to the present day declares that “as ties within the United Kingdom loosen, the English are suddenly embarking on a new chapter.” But its author, Robert Tombs, disclaims any overt political intention.

The idea of writing the book, he tells us, arose from a conversation with a distinguished scientific colleague of his at Cambridge, who revealed that he knew nothing about the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, when the Catholic King James II was replaced by the Dutch ruler William of Orange, thereby securing the end of monarchical absolutism in England and the ascendancy of the Protestant religion.1 Tombs does, however, believe that when in 2014 the Scots were promised greater autonomy if they voted to stay within the UK, the probable consequence was more selfgovernment for England, and with it greater English self- consciousness. His book will undoubtedly provide a charter for those who believe that there is 1

A likely explanation of his colleague’s ignorance is that in 1988–1989 the British government’s celebration of the Revolution’s tercentenary was distinctly low-key by comparison with France’s commemoration of the Revolution of 1789. One possible reason was a reluctance to upset Northern Irish Catholics by appearing to celebrate William’s defeat of James at the Battle of the Boyne, a central event in the mythology of Protestant Orangemen.

May 12, 2016

Alfred Morgan: An Omnibus Ride to Piccadilly Circus, Mr. Gladstone Travelling with Ordinary Passengers, 1885

such a thing as an English nation and that being English is not the same as being British.

Tombs is a respected authority on the history of France. His decision to attempt a large-scale history of England must have involved him in an impressively strenuous course of self- education. His generous list of acknowledgments reveals that he has picked the brains of nearly eighty other scholars and his endnotes testify to a vast amount of reading in the writings of other historians, even if he often fails to spell their names correctly.

Inevitably, the book reflects its local origins. He draws heavily on the work of Cambridge historians; he makes conspicuous use of articles in the Cambridge-based Historical Journal, on whose editorial board he serves; and if a historical figure happens to have been an alumnus of his Cambridge college he likes to remind us of the fact.

These touches of local piety do not detract from the merits of The English and Their History. It is an intellectually bracing and consistently challenging account. Tombs writes with self- confident clarity and panache, encapsulating complex issues in tersely pregnant sentences and enlivening his story with crisp, aphoristic, and often provocative judgments. Politics and public affairs provide the frame of his narrative, but he also pays attention to economic, social, and cultural issues and makes particularly effective use of English literature.

He is excellent on Victorian England, on World War I, and on the eighteenthcentury political system, which he mischievously compares to that of the modern United States. When discussing controversial topics like the Industrial Revolution or the effects of recent immigration, he can be relied upon for a balanced summary of expert opinion, peppered with shrewd insights of his own. The book is long, but its pace is admirably maintained throughout.

Readers may, however, be disappointed by its chronological imbalance. Tombs’s narrative covers more than fourteen hundred years of English history, but the first thousand years occupy only two hundred of its nine hundred pages of text, fewer than those devoted to the seventy- odd years since 1939, which are treated in disproportionately leisurely fashion. Tombs does not explain why he has chosen to slant his narrative so heavily toward the very modern period. In part, no doubt, the choice reflects his relative lack of expertise on the Middle Ages. But it also indicates a preoccupation with those aspects of history most relevant to understanding the contemporary scene.

Tombs is more concerned to identify the legacy of the past to the present than to evoke the past in its own terms.

He also points out that what actually happened in the past mattered less to posterity than the way in which it was subsequently remembered and mythologized. Central events in English history, like the Norman Conquest or

the Civil War, became the subject of conflicting narratives, each invoked in support of sharply opposed views on religion and politics. Tombs persuasively argues that the mythology of the past, whether created by historians or embodied in popular folklore, is an essential part of the story.

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is central theme is the creation of an English sense of identity and its mutations over the centuries. Its early appearance is remarkable, given the confused ethnic and political geography of Anglo- Saxon England. The Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and other Germanic peoples who settled in Britain between the late fourth and early seventh centuries formed a number of separate kingdoms. The situation was further complicated by the Viking invaders of the late eighth and ninth centuries, who colonized East Anglia and the north.

Yet though the people had no single ethnic origin and no single ruler, they all came to be called English.

Tombs stresses that this notion of Englishness preceded the existence of an English nation. When Pope Gregory the Great sent Augustine of Canterbury in 596 to convert the Anglo- Saxons to Christianity he thought of them as a single people (Angli). The outcome of the conversion was a single church of the gens Anglorum, with its two provinces of Canterbury and York.

The Northumbrian monk Bede, whom some regard as the greatest of all English historians, consolidated this notion of an English identity in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (circa 731). Yet it was not until the late ninth century that Alfred, king of Wessex, driven by the need to coordinate resistance to the Viking invaders, created what Tombs regards as an English nation by absorbing all the territory outside Danish control.

Had Tombs been able to read the recently published monograph by the Oxford historian George Molyneaux, he might have revised this judgment, for it seems that it was not the victories of Alfred but the administrative reforms of his mid-to-late-tenth- century successors that created the English kingdom.2 When Cnut the Dane acquired the throne by conquest in 1016, he found himself at the head of a powerful and united political unit occupying 2 George Molyneaux, The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2015).

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another and relied on Latin as the language of religion, learning, and administration. They also introduced what are nowadays thought of as typically English personal names: William, John, Richard, Robert, Margaret, Mary, and Emma. But spoken English survived in everyday speech and made a spectacular revival in the fourteenth century, when, partly in response to patriotic sentiment aroused by the Hundred Years’ War with France, it was officially adopted by Parliament and the law courts, and put to memorable use by Chaucer, Langland, and Wyclif.

Tombs is warmly appreciative of the enormous influence on the English language of William Tyndale’s earlysixteenth- century translations of all

Tombs also points to the enduring consequences of the two centuries of religious and political turmoil that followed the European Reformation. Most Continental countries moved toward the identification of a state and its people with a single religion, “confessionalization,” as it is called. But after some bitter struggles, the attempt to achieve religious uniformity in England was abandoned. Instead, in 1689 Protestant Nonconformists were allowed freedom of worship, though they were excluded from both public office and the universities until the nineteenth century.

This institutionalized division between church and dissent was reflected in long-persisting and sharply opposed political identities: Cavaliers and Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire/Bridgeman Images

a defined territory. It had also acquired a name: “Englalond.”

The strength of the late Anglo- Saxon state and the long survival of its central institutions have been much emphasized by modern historians. The shires, or counties, on which its highly efficient administrative structure was based lasted without major change until 1974.

The parishes into which the AngloSaxon Church began to divide the country remained the basic territorial unit of local government until modern times.

Local courts and the occasional meetings of a national representative body, the “witan,” made it easier for rulers to raise taxation and manpower; and the establishment of a uniform silver coinage assisted the growth of the economy.

In the dialect of Wessex, in the south of England, which became the standard written language, the Anglo-Saxon vernacular enjoyed a literary and courtly prestige unmatched by its European counterparts. Tombs rightly identifies the effective power of the royal government as a fundamental characteristic of subsequent English history.

The Norman Conquest of 1066 was a traumatic rupture, involving the annihilation of the English ruling class and the biggest transfer of property in English history. England was now owned and ruled by Frenchmen. But as Tombs stresses, the system of government remained: “England under the Normans was still recognizably England.” Unlike his predecessors, however, William the Conqueror insisted that all landholders held their property as if it were from him and he demanded their allegiance and service in return. The barons were given scattered possessions, rather than large continuous holdings, thus avoiding the risk of fragmentation.

Subsequent kings of England were now in a much stronger position than Continental rulers like the kings of West Francia and the German emperors.

In the 1160s and 1170s under Henry II the primacy of royal justice was further secured by the introduction of traveling judges (the “assize” judges of modern times) and the establishment of permanent law courts at Westminster. By contrast with the fragmented jurisdictions of medieval Europe, administering either Roman law or local custom, the English common law, with its jury system and its abhorrence of torture, was the first national system of law in Europe. Centuries later it would, in the words of the legal historian Sir John Baker, become “the law by which a third of the people of the earth were governed and protected.”

It was also in the twelfth century that the historians William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, resuming where Bede had left off, constructed a continuous narrative in which the Norman Conquest appeared not as a total rupture, but as merely an episode in the long history of the English people.

Tombs sees their work as a fundamental contribution to the idea of national history as a single narrative of a place and its successive inhabitants, reaching far into the past and continuing into the future despite invasions, dynastic changes, and cultural transformations.

It powerfully reinforced the sense of a distinct English identity.

An equally decisive medieval contribution to Englishness was the English language. The Old English of the Anglo- Saxons was rejected by the Normans, who spoke French to one

‘The Armada Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I; attributed to George Gower, circa 1588

the New Testament and much of the Old. They were subsequently employed as the basis of the King James Bible of 1611, though that marvelous work proved not to be to the taste of later generations. Tombs is silent about the banality of the New English Bible of 1961–1970, which T. S. Eliot described as astonishing “in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic.”

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shared language, a strong state with firmly demarcated boundaries, a distinctive legal system, and a common historical tradition are, for Tombs, the crucial ingredients of English identity; and all of them were firmly in place by the end of the Middle Ages. They were not the only respects in which England developed on distinctive lines. Tombs reminds us that villeinage—a form of serfdom—disappeared four centuries earlier than in most of Europe, thus generating the proud notion of “the freeborn Englishman.” He explains how the Tudors and early Stuarts lacked a police force and a standing army. Instead, the monarch ruled with the cooperation of the aristocracy and of Parliament, which met with increasing frequency at a time when representative institutions on the Continent were succumbing to royal absolutism.

In the absence of a paid bureaucracy on the French model, the strength and initiative of local communities, organized by lord-lieutenants, justices of the peace, parsons, and parish officers, provided “the bedrock of English governance until the 1940s.”

Roundheads, Tories and Whigs, Conservatives and Labour, pro-Thatcher and anti-Thatcher. Today’s party leaders, David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn, fit easily into this ancient polarity.

Tombs stresses that these “two antagonistic political sensibilities,” though passionately held, have long ceased to lead to physical violence. He singles out this combination of restraint with “visceral and unrelenting partisanship” as the essence of “a political culture strikingly different from that of other Western democracies.”

An eminently fair-minded writer, Tombs knows that the British Empire is less likely to be regarded these days as the disseminator to large parts of the globe of peace, representative government, and the rule of law than as an unwholesome amalgam of racism, greed, cruelty, and cultural arrogance. He obviously regards this as an unacceptably one-sided indictment, but he can see why its proponents make it and his own assessment of the Empire’s merits and demerits is admirably balanced.

For the most part, however, his sympathies are transparent. He writes of medieval Catholicism that “this familiar, beautiful, mysterious and yet accessible form of worship provided comfort and hope,” but he has hard words for the Puritans, particularly those who emigrated to North America to “establish a godly ‘city on a hill’ where they could persecute to their hearts’ content.” Unlike left-wing historians, always on the lookout for signs of class hostility, he tends to suggest that in most periods the lower classes were

reasonably happy with their lot.

He denies that there was any “serious public discontent” with Charles I’s eleven years of nonparliamentary rule and describes the king’s parliamentary opponents as “more bloodthirsty, far more bigoted, and vastly more paranoid in their vision of the world.” Following the now rather outdated “revisionist” historians, he maintains that the Civil War had no long-term causes but was a political accident that, far from securing liberty, nearly destroyed it. He has little time for the radical thinkers of the Interregnum era, citing a contemporary description of the Diggers, the little group led by Gerrard Winstanley, one of the seventeenth century’s most original and eloquent writers, as a harmless “company of crack-brains.”

He declares that eighteenth- century press gangs “were as likely to be victims . . . of violence” as its perpetrators, and he thinks the unreformed electoral system “worked not too badly.”

He concedes that the creation of the welfare state between 1946 and 1948 was an achievement for which the Labour government is rightly remembered. He also recognizes the growth of inequality in modern Britain, where the poorest classes are the fattest in Europe and the proportion of single mothers without jobs is four times the EU average. But he is wary of state intervention and dislikes the concentration of power in Whitehall, which, he says, has made today’s England “one of the biggest centralized administrative units in the world.”

He criticizes the current inadequacy of most state education and has mixed feelings about the National Health Service, which he regards as overfunded and inefficient by comparison with similar systems in New Zealand, Finland, and Spain. What he most admires in English political culture is its “suspicion of Utopias and zealots; trust in common sense and experience; respect for tradition; preference for gradual change; and the view that ‘compromise’ is victory, not betrayal.”

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his is a distinctly conservative view of the political scene. It also implies a distinction between “English” culture and British culture. Yet Tombs concedes that England has been an autonomous nation for only two short periods in its long history—between Alfred and Cnut, and again between 1453 and 1603 (though it included Calais until 1558 and Wales from the 1530s). From the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the midfifteenth century, England was merely a portion of a greater political unit that included a large part of France, at its peak a very large part. Its kings were often more preoccupied with retaining and extending their Continental dominions than they were with governing England.

Even then, they sometimes drew upon the assistance of the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish, as Shakespeare’s Henry V reminds us. With the union of the three crowns on the accession of James VI to the English throne in 1603 the affairs of England, Scotland, and Ireland became increasingly entangled: many modern historians refer to the English Civil War as the War of Three Kingdoms. In 1707 the Act of Union merged England and Scotland into the single Kingdom of Great Britain; and in 1800 Ireland was brought in to make The New York Review

up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The secession of the Irish Free State in 1922 meant a change of name to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

As an independent political unit England had long ceased to exist.

In these circumstances referring to the UK as “England,” though a common habit, and not just in the US, is at best inaccurate, at worst offensive.

An egregious, not to say astonishing example is the tombstone in a Berkshire churchyard of the Liberal politician H. H. Asquith (1852–1928), which identifies him as a former “Prime Minister of England.” Revealingly, when in a fiery parliamentary session of September 1939 Labour’s deputy leader Arthur Greenwood was urged by the Tory Leo Amery to “speak for England,” he responded by declaring that “Britain, and all that Britain stands for,” was in peril.

Tombs is aware of this terminological problem, but he never satisfactorily solves it. His attempt to separate the history of modern England from that of modern Britain inevitably leads him into periodic confusion, as when he tells us in one paragraph that the Battle of Waterloo exhibited “British phlegm” and in another that it demonstrated “the English ideal of masculine courage.” In discussing World War I he refers to “the English and British people” as if they were two distinct entities; and to illustrate the worries in the 1970s about “England’s supposedly unique economic decadence,” he cites publications with titles like Is Britain Dying?

His argument is that after 1707 England retained particular social, economic, and cultural characteristics that made it a distinct nation within a multinational state. “British,” he tells us, became a political identity, especially in the international setting, but “English” remained a cultural one. In practice, however, his attempt to define the distinguishing features of English culture

is disappointingly nebulous. Given the marked differences between the various regions of England, not least in the way they speak the English language, this is hardly surprising. Yorkshire and Sussex or Birmingham and the Lake District differ more from each other than does Herefordshire from mid-Wales or Northumberland from the Scottish Lowlands. The Georgian poets’ image of rural England with its thatched cottages, village cricket, and cream teas is as far removed from the life of presentday Liverpool or Bradford as is George Orwell’s picture of “old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning.”

In recent years these regional differences have been exacerbated by the uneven distribution of the new immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the EU. The industrial towns of the Midlands and the north contain large Muslim communities, and a third of London’s present population was born overseas.

Small towns and rural England, by contrast, have been largely unaffected by the recent influx.

In this new multicultural and multiethnic world the very idea of Englishness, always protean, is harder than ever to pin down. The old notion of the English as phlegmatic, reserved, undemonstrative, and possessed of a stiff upper lip no longer convinces in an age of social kissing and hugging, rock concerts, tearful celebrities, and sportsmen punching the air in triumph.

In recent years public figures from Gordon Brown (from Scotland) to Prince Charles have attempted to define “British” values. Usually they list a commitment to such ideals as freedom, democracy, tolerance, fair play, and the rule of law. It is hard to see what room this leaves for distinctively English values, though a case can be made for cricket, the proverbial source of the notion of fair play, and within the British Isles a quintessentially English game. Even so the winner of the county

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ombs has a tendency to treat British attributes and achievements as if they were peculiarly English ones. He explains that “England had very large coal deposits, which were indispensable to the Industrial Revolution,” but he makes no mention of the South Wales coalfields, which by 1913 made the Welsh port of Barry the largest coal exporter in the world. His chapter on the British Empire is entitled “Imperial England,” although he admits that the Empire was a project in which the Scots and Irish were disproportionately involved. He regards the English as the dominant political partner in the United Kingdom—“the front legs of the pantomime horse”—setting the common direction in domestic matters, as well as in foreign and imperial ones. Yet of the three twenty-first-century British prime ministers so far, two have been Scots and the surname of the third reveals his Scottish ancestry. During World War I Britain’s main political leader was a Welshman, David Lloyd George.

“Our Constitution, Sir. We Englishmen are Very Proud of our Constitution. It was bestowed on us by Providence. No Other Country is so Favoured as this Country.” Thus Mr. Podsnap in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Despite some justified reservations about the state of modern Britain, there is just a whiff of Podsnappery about Tombs’s view of English history.

He reminds us that its island location has preserved the country from subjugation by a foreign invader since 1066 and that, since the Civil War, it has enjoyed an exceptionally low level of internal violence. The Elizabethan Poor Law was “the best system of poor relief in Europe”; “by the late eighteenth century it was unique in the world.”

After the South Sea Bubble in 1720, English finance became “more honest”

CHRISTIANS IN THE KORAN To the Editors: Thanks to Garry Wills for describing so well his problems with reading the Koran in “My Koran Problem” [NYR, March 24].

I share his struggles. But I do not agree with him that Christians and Muslims are on the same page regarding their religious beliefs.

That’s because in Sura 4 the Koran says that Jesus never died on the cross for our sins, and that God isn’t triune. And in Sura 2 it says it abrogates or replaces previous revelations. Wills comments on neither of these notorious passages. I wish he would have because his account would have been more compelling if he had.

Reverend Ronald F. Marshall First Lutheran Church of West Seattle Seattle, Washington

The editors tell me that various concerns have been expressed about my Koran article, and that the Reverend Marshall expresses a sample of them with admirable economy, so I have been asked to comment on his request as representative of others’ reactions.

He doubts that Christians and Muslims are

May 12, 2016

By the standards of humanity as a whole, England over the centuries has been among the richest, safest and best governed places on earth. . . . We who have lived in England since 1945 have been among the luckiest people in the existence of Homo sapiens, rich, peaceful and healthy.

It is hard to disagree with any of these Panglossian propositions, though they will not reassure those many English citizens who are painfully aware of worrying racial inequalities, a growing gap between rich and poor, an inequitable electoral system, and an increasingly unimpressive political class. It is equally difficult not to feel uneasy about the future political purposes to which Tombs’s account might be put. What those who oppose the Balkanization of the UK most need now is a history that emphasizes the similarities among the British people rather than the differences.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

LETTERS

Garry Wills replies:

and “more efficient” than that of any European country.

The coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, moreover, brought out what two contemporary sociologists described as “a degree of moral unity equalled by no other large national state”; and in 2014 an international poll rated her “the world’s most admired woman.” By comparison with the rest of the world, “the English have become one of the least racist and least xenophobic of peoples.” “As long as its present civilization lasts, England will not have a violent revolution, or a military coup, or a religious civil war.” Tombs admits that things might be even better in a few other countries, but he insists some of the credit for that is due to the English, their economic and technological achievements, and their pioneering of the rule of law, representative government, and religious toleration. His final assessment of England and English history is nothing if not indulgent:

championship has sometimes been Welsh—Glamorgan.

Edgar Degas: Beside the Sea, monotype on paper, 1876 –1877.

For more on Degas’s monotypes, see Anka Muhlstein’s review of MoMA’s exhibition ‘Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty’ on pages 14–16 of this issue. “on the same page regarding their religious beliefs.” Not on the same page doctrinally, but similar enough to encourage useful and charitable exchanges and prayers. He asks how this can be when Sura 2 of the Koran

“abrogates” other religions’ claims. Actually, the Koran often cites Allah as the author of both the Torah and the Gospel, both of which he still affirms. Then what of Sura 2.106, cited by Reverend Marshall? “Any

revelation We cause to be superseded [abrogated in many translations] or forgotten, We replace with something better or similar.”

The abrogation (naskh) referred to was not of other religious texts but of earlier verses of the Koran itself that conflict with later verses. Allah says that he has the power to “erase” what he said before to Muhammad (13.39), to “substitute” a different teaching (16.101), or to “take away” what was said before (17.86). Muslim scholars variously count the number of such naskhs in the Koran, running from 5 to 247 or higher. They explain that some truths are universal, but that others address the temporal circumstances of an earlier revelation that are no longer applicable to a later one.

Islam was dealing with a problem in all revealed sacred writings. If the revelations come from God, how can they contradict one another? Some Jews cope with this by distinctions in the Halakha, some Protestants by “dispensationalism,” some Catholics by “development of doctrine.”

Like those schools, the naskh teaching is intratestamental, not intertestamental. As Joseph Lumbard says, in the authoritative Study Quran, “The Quran never declares that the covenant as observed by previous religious communities has been abrogated or rendered obsolete.”

Reverend Marshall also says that the status of Jesus is different in the two religions.

That is certainly true. He notes that “the Koran says that Jesus never died on the

73

largest collection of historical piano recordings and associated documents. For many questions the International Piano Archives at Maryland (IPAM) is not only the most authoritative source but the only one. All the more regrettable that, after fifty years of steady growth and a secure home at the University of Maryland, the most basic access to it remains—in an era when the most insular European archives are aggressively cataloging and placing their collections online—by walk-in during regular business hours. An online catalog is a worthy project the NEH should have seeded long ago.

I sent IPAM two unanswered e-mails from China (at a time, we later learned, that the Chinese government had been heavily disrupting email traffic) that inquired not only about early recordings of Debussy’s Études and Ravel’s Gaspard but, more importantly, whether any might have been easily available to a young New York pianist attending Princeton during the late 1940s, when Rosen was already playing both works. I was far more interested in potential influence than “firstness.â€?

It is highly unlikely that an eleven-year-old Rosen knew an English Decca recording of Debussy’s Études. Similarly, the flock of pianists on Mr. Manildi’s Ravel list (including the composer’s inner circle) are largely Europeans who recorded on labels he would not have encountered, and who did so after Rosen had formed his own conception; only a handful seem to have recorded for established Edgar Degas: Ludovic HalÊvy Finds Mme. Cardinal American labels. My in the Dressing Room, pastel and pencil over larger point—that Rosen’s monotype on paper, circa 1876 –1877 reading was very much his own—is only reinforced by the smattering of Gaspard performances even (as in pseudepigraphal Christian Gosrecently made available online. pels) imitates the Creator by forming out of mud a bird that comes to life (3.49, 5.110).

The Reverend Marshall seems to believe Robert Winter that Jesus must die “for our sins,� following Department of Music Anselm’s claim that only Jesus can pay the University of California, Los Angeles debt of human sin by his death. But a growfrom Guangzhou, China ing number of Christians agree with Abelard that God could not do what he did not ask of Abraham—kill his own son. It is true that the TURKS, TEACHERS & KURDS Koran denies that Jesus was God, as some Christians have done, from the many AriThe letter “Turkey’s Attack on Teachers� anisers of the past to the Unitarians of our [Letters, NYR, April 21] asserted that the day. But we still call them Christians, as we petition signed by 1,128 Turkish academcall believers in the Triune God monotheists. ics and intellectuals and made public at an The point is not that religions agree on all Istanbul news conference on January 11, points of doctrine (Christians disagree with 2016, “called for a resumption of peace Christians on such things, as Muslims distalks with the PKK.� agree with Muslims), but that we can find We regret that this was a mistranslation a love for God being sought in different of a sentence in the Turkish petition that ways, enough to learn from each other—as only called for “the government to prepare Pope Francis says that we can learn from the conditions for negotiations and create a the “spiritual treasures� of devout Muslims’ road map that would lead to a lasting peace lives (The Joy of the Gospel, p. 254). which includes the demands of the Kurdish political will.�

Private Collection

cross for our sins.� Yes, Allah takes Jesus straight into heaven without death (like Elias in 2 Kings 2.11). This is one of the many blessings Jesus gets in the Koran that are not given even to Muhammad. Jesus was born without human father, worked many miracles, and went to heaven without dying (4.157–158)—things not true of Muhammad. In fact, though the Koran expressly says that the Trinity is a heretical departure from the teaching of Jesus, the book comes surprisingly close to the language of the Christian Trinity: Jesus is the Word of Allah (3.45), conceived by the inbreathing of the Holy Spirit in Mary (66.12), and he will come again at the final judgment (3.55–56). He

CHARLES ROSEN ON HIS OWN To the Editors: In a letter posted on the New York Review website [“On the Works and Notes of Charles Rosen,â€? nybooks.com, April 21], Donald Manildi makes a number of points about my review of Charles Rosen’s Complete Columbia and Epic Album Collection [NYR, April 7]. He notes that Rosen was not the first pianist to record all twelve Debussy Études and that there were eighteen recordings of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit before Rosen’s in 1959, not two, as I wrote.

Unfortunately his letter did not reach me while I have been traveling in China so I was unable to answer it until now.

Mr. Manildi ably oversees the world’s

74

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