a journal of word and image
in their testosterone-lousy primes are quite partial to undraped demoiselles—never more so than when they are toasted. Let them admire Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave on 5. One is quick to imagine on first glance that she is ancient and white, but she is black for eyes deceive as history does, whereby lessons are missed by the heartless and stupid. Her shackled beauty is black. She is an American slave poured of cream. Larry Rivers’s July, also on 5, delivers us a softly operatic summer glimpse, a half-drawn cookout on canvas transpires: a black bike, a geometric shirt, a verdant yard wherein sun works, somewhere behind the scene, to throw light upon a table. Visitors in chairs enjoy shade and its opposite. The rendering is replete and as incomplete as leisure itself on a warm afternoon when thoughts of industry wash out in sunlight. But there’s work to do and be done and neither world enough nor time to edify the tool belts from the Local because today’s enlightenment is to be focused upon those wriggling pupils in the museum’s foreground pouring forth fresh from yellow vehicles. They depart in an orderly fashion and form lines at the entrance, queuing up alongside the point of entry in the rain. I am expected to join them among the sarcophagi. It will fall to me to distribute ebony implements and ensure that each is returned to the Medaglia d’Oro can once the eight-year-old masters have completed their works. I expect to be charged with reminding the uninitiated and forgetful that touching is prohibited. I will field inquiries, count heads and herd 30 juveniles from Ms. Lehman’s class through monumental rooms wherein together we will behold the Guardian Eye of Horus and Precinct of Mut as we marvel over the flexible equilibrium of the Late Egyptian Period before the Persians and Ptolemies advanced. The particulars of mummification will not fail The Glamorous Life | 27