Watercolorist Henry Fukuhara
Keith Crown
Abstract landscape painter Keith Crown, an art professor at UCLA, did mostly coastal scenes in oil and casein until the late ‘50s, when he switched to watercolor.
Bruno Gironcoli
Austrian sculptor Bruno Gironcoli created eclectic futuristic works whose techniques defied categorization. In his career, the artist refused to be placed in any one style of art.
The patron
"By the time of Louis XIV, private individuals as well as rulers felt and obligation-they “owed it to themselves”- to care for art and support its makers...His aim was to make supreme in the arts and in the crafts of luxury. Choosing the artists who were supposed to glorify the reign can hardly be a straightforward process, because choice is a cause of strife between cabals.
"One notable instance illustrates how uneasy the patron-artist relation is, and why. In the late 1630’s the French painter Poussin was living and working quietly in Rome . His renown reached Paris, and Louis XIII, possibly at Richelieu ’s suggestion, invited him to bestow his genius on his native land. The cardinal ordered Sublet de Noyers to conduct the negotiations. Poussin, valuing his comfort, had the good sense to decline, but he took a year and a half to do it, not wanting to seem ungrateful. Angered, M. de Noyers pointed out that the king ”had a long arm,” meaning that his influence in Rome could be used to create (unspecified)trouble for the artist. Poussin gave in.
"In Paris , very definite trouble awaited him. To begin with, he was ordered to paint allegorical murals: his specialty was small works. True, he did paint subjects from history or mythology, but they were really pretexts for a classical dreamland with a few figures and architectural fragments. Murals would have required large expanses of canvas showing many-sided action. Next, he was to decorate a long gallery in the Louvre, although he had never worked at architectural decorations. He went to work making sketches athletically but not peacefully. It seems the court wanted him to outdo Vouet, the painter favored by the town. Vouet’s clique thereupon devised every sort of hindrance and embarrassment to get rid of the interloper from abroad.
"...Poussin gave up the struggle, giving the excuse that his wife in Rome was ill and he must return."
Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 1st Perennial, 2001, pp. 554-5
"One notable instance illustrates how uneasy the patron-artist relation is, and why. In the late 1630’s the French painter Poussin was living and working quietly in Rome . His renown reached Paris, and Louis XIII, possibly at Richelieu ’s suggestion, invited him to bestow his genius on his native land. The cardinal ordered Sublet de Noyers to conduct the negotiations. Poussin, valuing his comfort, had the good sense to decline, but he took a year and a half to do it, not wanting to seem ungrateful. Angered, M. de Noyers pointed out that the king ”had a long arm,” meaning that his influence in Rome could be used to create (unspecified)trouble for the artist. Poussin gave in.
"In Paris , very definite trouble awaited him. To begin with, he was ordered to paint allegorical murals: his specialty was small works. True, he did paint subjects from history or mythology, but they were really pretexts for a classical dreamland with a few figures and architectural fragments. Murals would have required large expanses of canvas showing many-sided action. Next, he was to decorate a long gallery in the Louvre, although he had never worked at architectural decorations. He went to work making sketches athletically but not peacefully. It seems the court wanted him to outdo Vouet, the painter favored by the town. Vouet’s clique thereupon devised every sort of hindrance and embarrassment to get rid of the interloper from abroad.
"...Poussin gave up the struggle, giving the excuse that his wife in Rome was ill and he must return."
Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 1st Perennial, 2001, pp. 554-5
Leonardo Da Vinci
"As a young man, Leonardo was exceptionally beautiful. ... He was a homosexual vegetarian born out of wedlock who received very little formal education and was excluded by birthright from almost all professions. He was a mass of contradictions and conflicts, a man who rarely completed a commission ... [but wanted to] do as much as he possibly could and record everything he witnessed.
He wrote disapprovingly of war, but designed military hardware for several different European warlords; he was a masterful painter, perhaps the greatest who ever lived, but tired of art. He was scornful of received wisdom but steeped himself in classical learning, and while he believed the human form was the ultimate expression of the divine, he despised humanity. ... "
Leonardo was never able to come fully to terms with the fact that he had been deprived of a formal university education. ...
He once wrote with barely disguised bitterness: '[Establishment scholars] strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labours but with those of others and they will not even allow me my own.' ..."
At other times he displayed what some may consider to be an unhealthy contempt for humans in general, once declaring: 'How many people there are who could be described as mere channels for food, producers of excrement, fillers of latrines, for they have no other purpose in this world; they practise no virtue whatsoever; all that remains after them is a full latrine.' "Michael White, Leonardo, The First Scientist, St. Martin's Press, 2000, pp. 7-19.
Rodin
"In Rodin, France produced a sculptor of outstanding quality and importance. But he stood alone... "
He was more vehemently for the past than other sculptors but did not limit his enthusiasm to the classical tradition, taking a passionate interest in Gothic art and seeing Michelangelo as 'the culmination of all Gothic thought.'
All his work was concerned with the human figure. He had the original idea (inspired by classical remains) of making truncated figures, limbless and/or headless torsos, which were thought in his day to reveal a streak of sadism (as perhaps they do), but have the important effect of lifting sculpture out of the range of normal subject-matter into a sphere where its abstract qualities of line, mass and tension dominate the responses it evokes."
Rodin, who admired and encouraged Degas as a sculptor, went far beyond him in search of the unposed pose...
Rodin planned for deviations. His models moved around him and he captured in swift line-and-wash sketches those momentary dispositions that seemed to him expressive. Thus, like Michelangelo, he found in artistically unprecedented movements a whole world of expressive form that seemed to him at one with nature at large: 'A woman, a mountain or a horse are formed according to the same principles.' "Myers and Copplestone, General Editors, The History of Art, Dorset, 1990, pp. 819-820
Chopin
"At around two in the morning on 17 October 1849, Chopin died of consumption in an apartment in the Place Vendome, that most elegant 18th-century square in Paris. It is almost exactly opposite the hotel where, about 150 years later, Diana, Princess of Wales set out to her death; today, Chopin's plaque can be seen above a very smart jeweller's shop."....(He) had been born less than 40 years earlier, in a village near Warsaw...
The Poland into which Chopin was born, and for which he became a symbol, had long been an unhappy place. For centuries, its borders with Muscovy and the fiefdoms of the Ottoman Empire seem to have been permanently elastic. In seeking their disparate aims, thugs with Romantic names like Boleslaw and Casimir, and their supporters, hacked each other to bits.
Some of the worst were that ferocious combination of grail and sword known as the Teutonic Knights. Then, two centuries after the Knights ceased to be an active force, the Swedes and Russians inflicted damage on Poland as serious as that experienced by Germany in the Thirty Years War..."
The Poles have certainly claimed Chopin as embodying the nationalism of the Polish people, although very few of his works actually contain an identifiable folk tune. Some claim that 'the Polish blood throbs with particular vigour in his warlike polonaises, whose boldly arching melodies are of bent steel', and yet others have found evidence of him making political statements through his music, whatever this may mean...
Poland and its woes certainly stimulated his imagination; but it seems fair to say that 'Polish music owes to him something more and something greater than he does to Polish music'. The Poles, when their national identity had been obliterated, rallied around his music; he became a focus for their nationalism."Michael Steen, The Great Composers, Oxford, 2003, pp. 363-8
Beethoven
"Some people, Beethoven's special friends, maintain that it is precisely this symphony that is his masterpiece, that this is the genuine style for first- rate music, and that if it fails to please now, it is because the public is not sufficiently cultured, from an artistic point of view, to appreciate all these ethereal beauties; when a few thousand years have elapsed it will not fail to make its effect."
Another group denies that the composition has any artistic value and claims to see in it an unfettered quest for strangeness and effect. Through curious modulations and abrupt transitions, by joining together the most disparate elements, as for example when a pastoral in the grandest style is torn apart by the basses, by three horns, etc., a certain unwanted originality may result without much difficulty; but genius reveals itself not in the strange and the bizarre, but in the beautiful and the lofty. "The third group, a very small one, stands halfway between the others--it concedes that the symphony has many beauties, but also grants that the continuity is often completely disrupted, and that the enormous length of this longest, and possibly most difficult of all symphonies, exhausts even the connoisseur, and for the mere music lover it is unbearable; it would like Beethoven to employ his undoubtedly enormous talents in offering us works like his early compositions which have put him eternally in the company of the greatest instrumental composers.
It is afraid, however, that if Beethoven pursues his present bent both he and the public will suffer. His music could soon reach the point where one would take no pleasure in it, unless well-versed in the rules and problems of the art, but on the contrary would leave the concert hall with an unpleasant feeling of exhaustion from having been overwhelmed by a mass of disconnected and cumbersome ideas and a persistent noise from all the instruments."The public and Herr van Beethoven, who conducted, were not happy with each other on this evening; the public thought this symphony was too weighty, too long, and himself too ill-mannered, because he did not incline his head to acknowledge the applause which came from a section of the audience. On the contrary, Beethoven felt the applause was not sufficient."Alan Kendall, The Chronicle of Classical Music, Thames and Hudson, 1994, pp. 130-3.
Van Gogh
"Every Sunday the family, clad in black and bearing flowers, set off to the little cemetery at Groot-Zundert, where they went directly from the gate to a grave marked 'Vincent Wilhelm Van Gogh 1852.'
A single date to mark a birth and a death, for this was the grave of a child six weeks old. As the father, mother, two sons and three daughters prayed, the eldest of the boys--also called Vincent Wilhem--stared intensely at the gravestone and the name, his brother's, that was also his own."
The young Vincent Wilhelm was born March 30, 1853, a year to the day after the death of his brother. Was his destiny to be that of an earthly replacement for the child now lying at his feet beneath the slab of gray stone? To take the place of another? Or was he himself the other his identity had usurped?
Each Sunday little Vincent Van Gogh--the new Vincent--asked himself the same question, not daring to look at his mother with her hands joined and her eyes brimming with tears. Whom was she praying for? The dead child? Or for Vincent himself, the substitute? As they silently made their way home, Vincent, troubled and riven with doubt, stayed huddled against his younger brother Theo, born May 1, 1857, with whom he was very close.
The dismal ritual was repeated every Sunday for years. Every March 30, they celebrated Vincent's birthday, but who were the celebrations really for? The dead child or the boy who was now ten years old? ..."All his life Vincent would struggle against a brother more insistently present than if he had actually been alive, as his parents inevitably measured him against the virtues they attributed to the lost child."Pierre Cabanne, Van Gogh, Terrail, 2006, pp. 7- 8.
Debussy
"De Sivry decided to introduce the nine-year-old child to his mother, Mme Maute de Fleurville, a pianist who had once studied with Chopin ... 'But he must become a musician!' she declared and offered to give him lessons herself in preparation for the entrance examinations to the Paris Conservatoire. ..."
[At the Conservatoire], Professor Albert Lavignac ... spent long hours with the boy after class, discussing his strange questions that seemed to undermine the whole theory of music, and playing through revolutionary music with him ... Debussy loved to experiment openly with bizarre chords and unresolved tonalities; 'he used to amaze us with his weird playing' fellow-student Gabriel Pierne later wrote. ..."
[At age twenty] Debussy began work on the composition of a cantata for the Prix de Rome competition, and continued to disrupt the Conservatoire. On one occasion he is reported to have attempted to reproduce the sounds of buses on the piano at one of Guiraud's classes: 'What are you so shocked about?' he shouted at his embarrassed fellow-students, 'Can't you listen to chords without knowing their status and destination? Where do they come from? Whither are they going? What does it matter? Listen: that's enough. If you can't make head or tail of it, go and tell Monsieur le Directeur that I am ruining your ears.' Such arrogance was a natural result of Debussy's attempts to coin a new musical language close to his deepest feelings."Paul Holmes, Debussy, Omnibus, 1989, pp. 7-20.
Sargent's portraits
"When Sargent's portraits hung on the walls of galleries in London, Paris, New York, Boston, Chicago or Philadelphia, what seemed to distinguish them from works by other artists was the illusion they presented of life being lived, as if the membrane between real life and created art had been utterly thinned. At the Royal Academy in 1891, the Times critic wrote of La Carmencita:" 'What one gets from it is an extraordinary sense of vitality: this, one is half-inclined to say, is not a picture, it is the living being itself, and when the music strikes up she will be bound away in the dance. For beauty, that is another matter; the painter has not gone in search of it in the first instance--he has preoccupied himself with life, in the hope that beauty would emerge with it.'"In 1891 ... Sargent was still regarded as a young pretender. ... [T]he Pall Mall Gazette noted, 'They do not like his work at the Academy ... [and] the papers say he is an eccentric.' ... He was still very much a painter's painter, but his edgy style and innovatory compositions continued to arouse suspicion and unease. ... That changed during the spring of 1892 when Sargent painted two beautiful, cultivated women: Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, the epitome of stylish repose, and Mrs. Hugh Hammersley, an exercise in nervy refinement. When the portraits were exhibited the following spring ... critics were transported, writing in language rich with the vocabulary of sensation and abandon. ... "Sargent had developed a form of bravura realism crossed with impressionism, painting with an eye for the realities of light and colour in powerful and succulent brushstrokes so that his sitters were presented as real people. His vision and technique was introducing something new to the English portrait tradition and was beginning to stamp an exciting authority on the English art world."Richard Ormand and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, Yale, 2002, pp. 12-15.
Coltrane
"Coltrane was mid-solo on the first number, 'All of You,' when the whistling and catcalls began. ... A breathless flurry [of notes] cascaded forth. Coltrane built up steam, leaping between registers, finding sounds that tested ears attuned to more mellow tones. ... So, part of the audience thinks that Coltrane doesn't play well, that he was playing the wrong notes involuntarily. [They thought] too much drugs or alcohol or something like this. So they started to whistle."For the first time, most Parisians were witnessing the raw, boundless intensity that would guide the rest of Coltrane's career; what had been a tentative, experimental breeze when he first upped with Miles was becoming a full-force gale. ..."Following Mile's habitual set-closer, 'The Theme,' [French club impresario Frank] Tenet rushed backstage:" 'So, after the show, I said to John, 'You're too new for the people, they don't hear much of what they liked in the past. You go too far.' And he always had a little smile on his face. He said, 'I don't go far enough.' "Ashley Kahn, A Love Supreme, Penguin, 2002, pp. 3-5.
Babak Ebrahimian
"Translating thought into design is the hard part. If we make the decision that this is a world where Hamlet has a sense of paranoia, but there's real tension in the court caused by everybody being nervous about losing their head or job, I could start to use that. I probably wouldn't go so far as to say that I'm going to make it like Hitler's Germany.
I wouldn't necessarily use that as a specific reference, but I would start weighing up the qualities of different cultures and places that give me access to that kind of paranoia. Stalin is another example. ..."[Y]ou have to ... understand real history so that you can identify what you would do in 1776.
Then the [next] part is to take all that information and abstract it so that it's not a specific time or place. You have to have the skill to extract a design idea. Designers have to know about history and its relationship to the world, whether it's about the sciences, war, or politics; we have to know about literature, because almost every great play references other great plays. ...
I have to deal with an actor who has problem feet and a bad stomach, and insecurities about weight and baldness, but then I'm the one who has to take that actor through the transformation to become somebody else.
Actors have to trust that I will not make them look bad. At the same time I have to be confident enough in my choices that I can take them to the place they need to be. It's the greatest compliment when they are finally dressed and say, 'Now I know who I am.' ..."I believe every designer has to think holistically.
If I put somebody in black in a white space, that's one thing; if I put somebody in black in a black space, that's a completely different thing; if I put them in candlelight, that's something else. ...""Sometimes you can do something huge with a character. Take Wicked, because it's simple storytelling without a lot of loops in the story.
I've got one character who is a kind of ditzy, sweet, woman, and by the end she's a power-hungry killer. I used pictures of Queen Elizabeth I, moving her from this innocent woman to somebody who's got her hair scraped back, structured and powerful. Sometimes you get to tell the story that way."Babak Ebrahimian, Structured Spaces, Focal Press, 2006, pp. 59-63.
I wouldn't necessarily use that as a specific reference, but I would start weighing up the qualities of different cultures and places that give me access to that kind of paranoia. Stalin is another example. ..."[Y]ou have to ... understand real history so that you can identify what you would do in 1776.
Then the [next] part is to take all that information and abstract it so that it's not a specific time or place. You have to have the skill to extract a design idea. Designers have to know about history and its relationship to the world, whether it's about the sciences, war, or politics; we have to know about literature, because almost every great play references other great plays. ...
I have to deal with an actor who has problem feet and a bad stomach, and insecurities about weight and baldness, but then I'm the one who has to take that actor through the transformation to become somebody else.
Actors have to trust that I will not make them look bad. At the same time I have to be confident enough in my choices that I can take them to the place they need to be. It's the greatest compliment when they are finally dressed and say, 'Now I know who I am.' ..."I believe every designer has to think holistically.
If I put somebody in black in a white space, that's one thing; if I put somebody in black in a black space, that's a completely different thing; if I put them in candlelight, that's something else. ...""Sometimes you can do something huge with a character. Take Wicked, because it's simple storytelling without a lot of loops in the story.
I've got one character who is a kind of ditzy, sweet, woman, and by the end she's a power-hungry killer. I used pictures of Queen Elizabeth I, moving her from this innocent woman to somebody who's got her hair scraped back, structured and powerful. Sometimes you get to tell the story that way."Babak Ebrahimian, Structured Spaces, Focal Press, 2006, pp. 59-63.
Bach's great Mass
"Bach's great Mass in B Minor was never performed during his lifetime: as a Catholic Mass, it could not be played in a Protestant church, and the use of an orchestra was forbidden in Catholic churches during Bach's lifetime, although he hoped it might eventually be possible. His 'Goldberg' variations is the most successful of all his works in concert performance today, yet the kind of concert in which it can be performed did not exist for another century, and it had to wait for recognition and acclaim for still another hundred years. ... The first great set of works to become the staple of serious public piano performances was the thirty-two Beethoven piano sonatas: only two of these were played in a concert hall in Vienna during Beethoven's lifetime. ... [A]s the musical system changes over the centuries, possibilities of exploiting the musical language suggest themselves that are too fascinating to ignore, but the works inspired by this stimulus may possibly have to wait a long time for their exploitation..." Charles Rosen, from his review of The Oxford History of Western Music, by Richard Taruskin, The New York Review of Books, February 23, 2006, p. 43.
Dali
"Dali described the genesis of this painting in his 1942 autobiography ... in which he claimed that the unforgettable limp watches were inspired by the remains of a very strong Camembert cheese. He had contemplated this cheese one evening after dinner, when he stayed at home with a headache while [his wife] Gala went to the cinema with friends.
Having meditated on the 'super-soft' qualities of the runny cheese, Dali went to his studio where he suddenly realized how he should finish a lonely landscape featuring the rugged cliffs of the Catalan coast, illuminated by a never-setting sun, which had been sitting on his easel awaiting inspiration."
I knew the atmosphere which I had succeeded in creating with this landscape was to serve as a setting for some idea, for some surprising image, but I did not in the least know what it was going to be ... "
Throughout his career Dali explored his fascination with softness and malleability in numerous paintings, sculptures and works on paper, ... however none has a more obvious sexual significance than the limp pocket watches in this painting. ..."Although Gala would prophetically claim that 'no one can forget it once he has seen it,'
The Persistence of Memory was left unsold when it was first shown in Paris. ... However the young American art dealer, Julien Levy, acquired the painting shortly after the close of the show, paying the trade price of a mere $250." Dawn Ades and Michael R. Taylor, Dali, Rizzoli, 2005, p. 148.
Walt Disney
"The staff continued to grow, but Walt realized that simply adding more animators and background artists and story men would not achieve the quality he sought. ... In 1931, Walt arranged with the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles for his artists to attend night classes, with the studio paying the tuition. Since many of the young employees couldn't afford cars, Walt himself drove them downtown to the school, returned to the studio for an evening's work, then picked up the students when the classes were over. When the United Artists contract assured a greater flow of funds into the studio, Walt decided to establish a school at the studio. He asked a Chouinard teacher, Don Graham, to conduct classes two nights a week on the studio sound stage. ..."Graham was admittedly unschooled in animation, and some of the students resisted his instruction. Scornful cartoons appeared on the studio bulletin board, depicting Mickey Mouse with an anatomically detailed pelvis. But as time went on, each side learned from the other. ... The art school began to fulfill the function that Walt had designed for it: to develop the talent that would carry animation to heights that only he envisioned."Bob Thomas, Walt Disney, Disney Editions, 1994, p. 115-6.
Dada
"Max Ernst was drafted into an artillery regiment of the German army in 1914. He was wounded twice in the Great War--once by a gun recoil and once by a mule kick--and earned the nickname 'Iron Head' for these troubles. 'We young people came back from the war in a state of stupefaction,' Ernst later wrote. In his autobiographical sketch, 'Some Data on the Youth of M.E. as Told by Himself' (1942), he presents the entire war as a loss of consciousness, indeed of life: 'Max Ernst died the 1st of August 1914.
He resuscitated the 11th of November 1918.' This emphasis on shock is suggestive, as is the alienation of the first-person voiced by that of the third person, for his Dada work often deploys such tell-tale signs of narcissistic disturbance. ... "If Dada stands for anything, it is for and against. For and against unity; for and against affirmation and negation; for equations as long as they don't equate, against them when they do.
The stance extends to the label Dada itself, which means nothing and everything. Dada is any word--cow, cube, bar of soap, nurse, yes, hobby horse--yet Dada is also the heart of words, a modernist mantra, a machine-age tetragrammaton. This simultaneous stance of for and against is never reducible to clowning about. Rather it is integral to a global strategy of contradiction: the positive Dada response to a cluster of negatives."The Dada Seminars, edited by Leah Dickerman with Matthew Witkowsky, Copyright 2005, Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, pp. 127, 32.
Weimar period artists
"Berlin was reeling from the shock of mass slaughter, defeat in war, failed revolution, economic catastrophe, and hyperinflation ... This provided fertile ground for sexual adventure and artistic experimentation but was also the source of social panic, from which the hedonism of the brothel and the dance hall--and, a few years later, massive rallies to worship the Fuhrer-- offered a temporary escape. ..."
Weimar period artists tried to do two things at once. They wished to reclaim the individual from the impersonal brutality of the machine age while at the same time they played with roles and stereotypes. Masquerades, of one kind or another, were a feature of cultural life in the 1920s.
The trick was to show the face behind the mask, to discover a new equilibrium between character, self-representation, and social roles in an age when everything seemed out of whack. "You see these concerns in the portraits of others but also in the many self-portraits made at the time. Max Beckmann, for one, was forever posing in different costumes: the lounge lizard in dinner jacket; the pierrot at the circus; the tormented artist. [Otto] Dix portrayed himself as a sinister guest at a wild jazz dance, as a wounded prisoner of war, as a painter with his whorish muse. ... Like Dix, [Christian] Schad created iconic images of 1920s types. ... Then there was [George] Grosz, playacting with his wife, Eva, the nude victim of Jack the Ripper. ..."Role-playing was the essence of the erotic life of Berlin. Men, boys, girls, and women catered to every fantasy. You had the so-called Boot Girls, prostitutes who hung around cheap hotels, wearing boots in black leather, or green, or blue, or gold patent leather, each color a sign of the wearer's particular sadomasochistic specialty. Then there were the Racehorses, who offered themselves up to be whipped, or the Telephone Girls, often mere children with the names of popular movie stars, or Nuttes, teenagers from good families, out for spare cash and kicks. ..."The topsy-turvy world of sexual playacting came into being partly as a result of economic necessity. Respectable war widows were sometimes forced to sell themselves in the streets. But it was also a sign of the times, when people played roles, switching them around, perverting them, undermining them, not as an escape from too many social constraints ... but as a symptom of a society that had lost its moorings."Sabine Rewald, Glitter and Doom, Yale University Press, Copyright 2006 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, pp. 7-19.
Weimar period artists tried to do two things at once. They wished to reclaim the individual from the impersonal brutality of the machine age while at the same time they played with roles and stereotypes. Masquerades, of one kind or another, were a feature of cultural life in the 1920s.
The trick was to show the face behind the mask, to discover a new equilibrium between character, self-representation, and social roles in an age when everything seemed out of whack. "You see these concerns in the portraits of others but also in the many self-portraits made at the time. Max Beckmann, for one, was forever posing in different costumes: the lounge lizard in dinner jacket; the pierrot at the circus; the tormented artist. [Otto] Dix portrayed himself as a sinister guest at a wild jazz dance, as a wounded prisoner of war, as a painter with his whorish muse. ... Like Dix, [Christian] Schad created iconic images of 1920s types. ... Then there was [George] Grosz, playacting with his wife, Eva, the nude victim of Jack the Ripper. ..."Role-playing was the essence of the erotic life of Berlin. Men, boys, girls, and women catered to every fantasy. You had the so-called Boot Girls, prostitutes who hung around cheap hotels, wearing boots in black leather, or green, or blue, or gold patent leather, each color a sign of the wearer's particular sadomasochistic specialty. Then there were the Racehorses, who offered themselves up to be whipped, or the Telephone Girls, often mere children with the names of popular movie stars, or Nuttes, teenagers from good families, out for spare cash and kicks. ..."The topsy-turvy world of sexual playacting came into being partly as a result of economic necessity. Respectable war widows were sometimes forced to sell themselves in the streets. But it was also a sign of the times, when people played roles, switching them around, perverting them, undermining them, not as an escape from too many social constraints ... but as a symptom of a society that had lost its moorings."Sabine Rewald, Glitter and Doom, Yale University Press, Copyright 2006 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, pp. 7-19.
Coplandesque
"Countless films, television commercials, news broadcasts, and campaign ads have employed Coplandesque open-interval melodies to suggest the innate goodness of small-town rural life--elderly couple sitting on porches, newsboys on bicycles, farmers leaning on fences. A diluted version of the 'open prairie' manner was heard in Ronald Reagan's 'Morning in America' campaign ads. ... 'Appalachian Spring,' with its grand and gritty harmonization of the Shaker tune 'Simple Gifts,' has evolved into something like national them music--the leitmotif of feel-good news. At the height of the Cold War, however, political watchdogs did not fail to notice Copland's leftward leanings. ..."[By 1952] he had already been labelled a 'fellow traveler' in the pages of Life. He had watched as old colleagues, such as Marc Blitzstein and Hanns Eisler, were subjected to interrogation or driven out of the country. As a gay man, he had extra reason to worry: the FBI was conducting separate purges of homosexuals on the theory that they made easy targets for Soviet blackmail."On January 20, 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated as President. Copland's 'Lincoln Portrait' had been scheduled for a preliminary inaugural concert by the National Symphony, but, two weeks before the event, Fred Busbey, an Illinois congressman, denounced the work as Communist propaganda and demanded that it be removed from the program. ..."Copland released a statement couched in the defensive jargon of the day: 'I say unequivocally that I am not now and never have been a communist or member of any organization that advocates or teaches in any way the overthrow of the United States.' nonetheless, 'Lincoln Portrait' was not played for President-elect Eisenhower at Constitution Hall."Finally, on May 22, 1953, came the dreaded telegram: YOU ARE HEREBY DIRECTED TO APPEAR BEFORE THIS COMMITTEE ON MONDAY MAY TWENTYFIFTH AT TWOTHIRTY P M ROOM 357 SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC-JOE MCCARTHY CHAIRMAN SENATE PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS. ..."[After the hearing and] for a time, Copland was hassled when he tried to travel abroad; the passport agency declined to renew his passport, and repeatedly requested that he demonstrate affiliations with anti-Communist organizations. In 1953, he had several engagements rescinded on political grounds."Alex Ross, "Appalachian Autumn," The New Yorker, August 27, 2007, pp. 34-39.
Washington Square Park
"After the British took over in 1664, and renamed the city in honor of the Duke of York, the center of commerce remained in lower Manhattan, but English military officers built large homes to the north, in the countryside that reminded them of Greenwich, England. ...
The spot that became Washington Square Park remained undeveloped, but it wasn't a park from the beginning. It was a graveyard."At the end of the eighteenth century, the city was in the grip of a yellow fever epidemic, and officials needed a place to bury the poor people dying monthly by the dozens. ...
It is believed that some twenty thousand bodies remain under the park, and bones and skeleton-filled underground chambers have periodically turned up during construction and utility excavations."
The area was also used as a public gallows - leading the big English elm at the northwestern corner to be called the 'hanging elm,' though no records exist of an execution from its limbs - and a dueling ground. Philip Hone, a wealthy military hero from the War of 1812 who became mayor of New York in 1826 ... launched a campaign for a military parade ground at the site, winning approval in time for a fiftieth anniversary celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when the square was officially renamed in honor of George Washington. ..."
From 1830 to the turn of the century, the neighborhood around the park was the most desirable in New York. ... It was the Vanderbilts and Astors whose lavish parties and costume balls prompted Mark Twain to call the materialistic post-Civil War era the 'Gilded Age.' All the while, a community of the arts and letters grew up around the square. ..."The park got its signature arch at the end of the nineteenth century [when] city officials were planning the centennial of George Washington's presidency. ...
It was instantly a postcard image of New York and Greenwich Village. ..."Its central location also made it a popular spot for agitated New Yorkers of all kinds to hold protests, vigils, and demonstrations. In 1834, stonecutters unhappy with New York University's decision to use prison labor for the marble fixtures for its campus buildings fanned out around the park smashing windows and marble mantels. Fifteen years later it was the Astor Place Opera House riot, pitting English against Irish.
Then came the draft riots of 1863, when predominantly Irish laborers roamed the streets around the park, cutting telegraph lines and beating and killing black men. Suffragettes and veterans of the Spanish-American War marched through. ..."At the turn of the twentieth century, Greenwich Village became a magnet for rebellious artists, painters, writers, and social commentators. Walt Whitman and the newspaper pioneer Horace Greeley were in the vanguard, hanging out at the nearby beer hall Pfaff's. ...
The Village continued its spirit of rebellion through the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition and was, naturally, the site of several infamous speakeasies. ... In the 1950s, the beat writer Jack Kerouac, the poet Allen Ginsberg, the jazz musicians Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, and folksingers like David Sear all came to inhabit the cafes and clubs and studios and apartments of [the neighborhood]."
As an urban historian, [preservation activist] Jane Jacobs appreciated the extraordinary evolution from cemetery, gallows, and dueling ground to a setting for Victorian promenades and classic Beaux Arts monumentality, to an outdoor rendezvous for Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan, and on into the age of Aquarius.
Hoop dresses to black jeans: that was the power of a place that was unplanned and organic. It was everything that was proper and respectable and aristocratic about New York City life - and at the same time it represented rebellion against the establishment, authority, and order."
Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses, Random House, Copyright 2009 by Anthony Flint, pp. 67-71.
Jazz
"[In 1955, Congressmen Adam Clayton] Powell proposed a plan for boosting the nation's image around the world. ... Let them see and hear our jazz bands. Not only would jazz tours refute the Soviet line that America lacked a native culture; they would also soften the image of American racism, as many jazz bands featured black and white musicians playing together. ..."The State Department approved Powell's idea. Powell convinced his good friend Dizzy Gillespie to make the first goodwill tour, leading an eighteen-piece big band. ...
Musicians like Gillespie, [Louis] Armstrong, [Benny] Goodman, [Duke] Ellington, and [Dave] Brubeck were superstars, and their tours became sensations. ... It was never clear whether the Jazz Ambassadors - whose tours continued through the early seventies - affected world opinion of American foreign policy; probably not. But in many countries, they did have a substantial impact on the broader image of America, its vitality and its culture. "The influence worked both ways. On their tours, the jazzmen didn't just play; they also listened to local musicians. And just as they brought a taste of America to the rest of the world, they also brought a taste of the world back home. Dave Brubeck and his quartet were sent on an exhaustive tour in 1958, encompassing East Germany, Poland, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Ceylon, Iran, and Iraq - a 'circle of Russia,' as Brubeck's wife, Iola, would later call it.
"Walking around Istanbul one morning, Brubeck heard a group of street musicians playing an exotic rhythm, fast and syncopated. It was in 9/8 time - nine eighth notes per measure - a very unusual meter in Western music, and the players phrased the notes in a still more jarring way: not 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, as might be expected, but 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2-3. "Later that day, Brubeck had an interview scheduled at a local radio station. Like many broadcasters at the time, the station had its own symphony orchestra.
When Brubeck arrived, the musicians were taking a break from a rehearsal. He told some of them about the rhythm that he'd heard on the streets and asked if anyone knew what it was. He hummed the tune, and several of the musicians started playing it, adding flourishes and counterpoint, even improvising on it. It was a traditional Turkish folk song, widely known - at least in Turkey. ..."
All during the 1958 tour, Brubeck heard odd meters and raga rhythms from local musicians, and when his quartet played with them, they were all astonished that his drummer, Joe Morello, could match these rhythms precisely. "When Brubeck got back to the United States, he was inspired to make an album that would break out of the standard 4/4 time that marked almost all jazz tunes, no matter how adventurous they might otherwise be. And he especially wanted to write something based on that 9/8 folk tune he'd heard in Istanbul. "Brubeck was one of the most famous jazz musicians in the country ... [and] could do pretty much whatever he wanted. ... Brubeck and the quartet flew to New York and - over three sessions, on June 25, July 1, and August 18 - made the album that he'd wanted to make.
It was called Time Out, and it would become, after Kind of Blue, one of the biggest-selling jazz albums ever. After they realized that they had a hit on their hands, Columbia Records executives also released a 45-rpm single - consisting of two songs from the album - and it sold a million more copies. On one side of the single was 'Take Five,' a Paul Desmond composition in 5/4 time (five quarter notes per measure instead of the usual four). On the other side was 'Blue Rondo à la Turk,' based on the staccato 9/8 rhythm of the Istanbul street song. "The record's huge success signaled that American audiences, on the eve of the sixties, were ready, even yearning, for at least a taste of the exotic."
Fred Kaplan, 1959, Wiley, Copyright 2009 by Fred Kaplan, pp. 127-132.
Musicians like Gillespie, [Louis] Armstrong, [Benny] Goodman, [Duke] Ellington, and [Dave] Brubeck were superstars, and their tours became sensations. ... It was never clear whether the Jazz Ambassadors - whose tours continued through the early seventies - affected world opinion of American foreign policy; probably not. But in many countries, they did have a substantial impact on the broader image of America, its vitality and its culture. "The influence worked both ways. On their tours, the jazzmen didn't just play; they also listened to local musicians. And just as they brought a taste of America to the rest of the world, they also brought a taste of the world back home. Dave Brubeck and his quartet were sent on an exhaustive tour in 1958, encompassing East Germany, Poland, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Ceylon, Iran, and Iraq - a 'circle of Russia,' as Brubeck's wife, Iola, would later call it.
"Walking around Istanbul one morning, Brubeck heard a group of street musicians playing an exotic rhythm, fast and syncopated. It was in 9/8 time - nine eighth notes per measure - a very unusual meter in Western music, and the players phrased the notes in a still more jarring way: not 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, as might be expected, but 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2-3. "Later that day, Brubeck had an interview scheduled at a local radio station. Like many broadcasters at the time, the station had its own symphony orchestra.
When Brubeck arrived, the musicians were taking a break from a rehearsal. He told some of them about the rhythm that he'd heard on the streets and asked if anyone knew what it was. He hummed the tune, and several of the musicians started playing it, adding flourishes and counterpoint, even improvising on it. It was a traditional Turkish folk song, widely known - at least in Turkey. ..."
All during the 1958 tour, Brubeck heard odd meters and raga rhythms from local musicians, and when his quartet played with them, they were all astonished that his drummer, Joe Morello, could match these rhythms precisely. "When Brubeck got back to the United States, he was inspired to make an album that would break out of the standard 4/4 time that marked almost all jazz tunes, no matter how adventurous they might otherwise be. And he especially wanted to write something based on that 9/8 folk tune he'd heard in Istanbul. "Brubeck was one of the most famous jazz musicians in the country ... [and] could do pretty much whatever he wanted. ... Brubeck and the quartet flew to New York and - over three sessions, on June 25, July 1, and August 18 - made the album that he'd wanted to make.
It was called Time Out, and it would become, after Kind of Blue, one of the biggest-selling jazz albums ever. After they realized that they had a hit on their hands, Columbia Records executives also released a 45-rpm single - consisting of two songs from the album - and it sold a million more copies. On one side of the single was 'Take Five,' a Paul Desmond composition in 5/4 time (five quarter notes per measure instead of the usual four). On the other side was 'Blue Rondo à la Turk,' based on the staccato 9/8 rhythm of the Istanbul street song. "The record's huge success signaled that American audiences, on the eve of the sixties, were ready, even yearning, for at least a taste of the exotic."
Fred Kaplan, 1959, Wiley, Copyright 2009 by Fred Kaplan, pp. 127-132.
Mozart's works
"Order is imperiled in Mozart's works but ultimately prevails: it is this sense of form that allows us in large measure to account for Karl Barth's profound observation that whereas 'darkness, chaos, death, and hell do appear [in Mozart's music] ... not for a moment are they allowed to prevail.' Barth continues his meditation:" 'What occurs in Mozart is rather a glorious upsetting of balance, a turning in which the light rises and the shadows fall, though without disappearing, in which joy overtakes sorrow without extinguishing it. ... This feature is enough to mark Mozart's church music as truly sacred.' ...
Barth was right to suspect that the sense of life finding its embodiment in musical form had a religious dimension too. In a famous letter of 4 April 1787, addressed to his gravely ill father (Leopold died on 28 May), Mozart wrote:" '
As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity (you know what I mean) of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness. I never lie down at night without reflecting that--young as I am--I may not live to see another day. Yet no one of all my acquaintances could say that in company I am morose or disgruntled.
For this blessing I daily thank my Creator.'"Too urbane and civilized to be morose or disgruntled in company, Mozart was yet no stranger to life's shadows. And while he wrote to offer his father encouragement, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of a faith that allowed him to consider death to be the true goal of our existence and the final consoling turn. Nor is there any reason to believe that this faith was formed only during Mozart's last years. Our most profound convictions are formed and reformed over an entire lifetime.
The same conviction of 1787 is present, albeit inchoate and naively expressed, in a letter the fourteen-year-old Mozart wrote from Bologna to his mother in Salzburg on 29 September 1770:" 'I am sincerely sorry to hear of the long illness which poor jungfrau Martha has to bear with patience, and I hope that with God's help she will recover. But, if she does not, we must not be unduly distressed, for God's will is always best and He certainly knows best whether it is better for us to be in this world or in the next. She should console herself, however, with the thought that after the rain she may enjoy the sunshine.' "
Karol Berger, Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow, University of California Press, Copyright 2007 by the Regents of the University of California, pp. 189-190.
Fred Astaire.
"Gifts come from God, presents from men and women. Serious talent is largely a gift from God. Charm is a present men and women bestow upon one another. No one is born charming, though charm comes fairly easily to some and is apparently quite impossible for others."Charm has to do with pleasing, light-handedly, sometimes to the point of fascination.
He or she 'turned on the charm,' we say, by which we mean that a man or woman cast a spell, however fleeting. Temporary enchantment is the state to which a charming person brings us. Charm is a performance of a kind; it is virtuosity of the personality. Charm is confident, never strained, always at ease in the world. Charm is not pushing; it has a fine sense of proportion and measure, never goes too far, never stays too long.
Charm is Noel Coward, entering a party wearing an ordinary suit, discovering every other man in the room dressed in white tie and tails, and blithely announcing, 'Please, I don't want anyone to apologize for overdressing.' ..."Charm is elegance made casual, with emphasis on the casual. Charm mustn't seem too studied, forced, overdone. As Fred Astaire knew in his light bones, charm is bright, breezy, pleasing in and of itself. Charm knows when to turn itself off, when to depart, which is why it is invariably wanted back.
Charm puts things interestingly, amusingly, surprisingly, sometimes originally, but never heavily, never too insistently. ..."So many traditions of charm are European or Asian in their provenance. English charm, French charm, Italian charm are perhaps the chief variants. ... Americans can be amusing, hilarious, winning, immensely attractive, yet seldom full-out charming. ...
Charm tends to the aristocratic, and American charm, in the nature of the case, doesn't quite qualify. When it attempts an aristocratic tinge, it comes off as fake English or stuffily European. American charm, to be truly American, has somehow to combine the aristocratic with the democratic, while straining out all traces of snobbery. ..."American charm, at least as on exhibit in the movies, was best portrayed by Fred Astaire.
Although he dressed English-aristocratic, in his movies Astaire always bore boy-next-door American names such as Pete Peters or Huck Haines. In most of Astaire's movies, his manner was sometimes just slightly big city wise-guy, but also gee-whiz small town. ...
Once he is on the dance floor--just him and the night and the music--his charm kicks in, the girl is his, the movie's over, you walk out of the theater (or, more likely nowadays, rise from your couch before the television set), and, humming the flick's final song, wonder why in the hell it wasn't given to you to be able to move as lightly, as wonderfully, as absolutely charmingly as Fred Astaire."
Joseph Epstein, Fred Astaire, Yale, Copyright 2008, pp. 53-60.
He or she 'turned on the charm,' we say, by which we mean that a man or woman cast a spell, however fleeting. Temporary enchantment is the state to which a charming person brings us. Charm is a performance of a kind; it is virtuosity of the personality. Charm is confident, never strained, always at ease in the world. Charm is not pushing; it has a fine sense of proportion and measure, never goes too far, never stays too long.
Charm is Noel Coward, entering a party wearing an ordinary suit, discovering every other man in the room dressed in white tie and tails, and blithely announcing, 'Please, I don't want anyone to apologize for overdressing.' ..."Charm is elegance made casual, with emphasis on the casual. Charm mustn't seem too studied, forced, overdone. As Fred Astaire knew in his light bones, charm is bright, breezy, pleasing in and of itself. Charm knows when to turn itself off, when to depart, which is why it is invariably wanted back.
Charm puts things interestingly, amusingly, surprisingly, sometimes originally, but never heavily, never too insistently. ..."So many traditions of charm are European or Asian in their provenance. English charm, French charm, Italian charm are perhaps the chief variants. ... Americans can be amusing, hilarious, winning, immensely attractive, yet seldom full-out charming. ...
Charm tends to the aristocratic, and American charm, in the nature of the case, doesn't quite qualify. When it attempts an aristocratic tinge, it comes off as fake English or stuffily European. American charm, to be truly American, has somehow to combine the aristocratic with the democratic, while straining out all traces of snobbery. ..."American charm, at least as on exhibit in the movies, was best portrayed by Fred Astaire.
Although he dressed English-aristocratic, in his movies Astaire always bore boy-next-door American names such as Pete Peters or Huck Haines. In most of Astaire's movies, his manner was sometimes just slightly big city wise-guy, but also gee-whiz small town. ...
Once he is on the dance floor--just him and the night and the music--his charm kicks in, the girl is his, the movie's over, you walk out of the theater (or, more likely nowadays, rise from your couch before the television set), and, humming the flick's final song, wonder why in the hell it wasn't given to you to be able to move as lightly, as wonderfully, as absolutely charmingly as Fred Astaire."
Joseph Epstein, Fred Astaire, Yale, Copyright 2008, pp. 53-60.
The Louvre
"Most important [of Napoleon's rebuilding projects] was the establishment in the Louvre, from 1803 onwards, of Europe's biggest art gallery, to provide a permanent home for the many works of art he had stolen from the countries he had conquered and occupied."
To run this Musee Napoleon for him, the Emperor found one of those extraordinary geniuses ... Vivant Denon. ... The notion of a gallery open to the public stemmed from the historically much maligned Louis XVI. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the royal collections had been kept for the private delectation of the court and of privileged visitors. ...
It was Louis XVI himself who suggested reuniting everything that the crown possessed of 'beauty in painting and sculpture' under the name of 'museum' (a concept borrowed from England). Explained Denon, 'The French Republic, by its force, the superiority of its light and its artists, is the only country in the world which could provide an inviolable asylum to these masterpieces.' "
Napoleon took a great interest--amounting to interference--in the museum named after him. On his return from [the Battle of] Jena in September 1806, he was already complaining about the queues on a Saturday afternoon--with the result that the hours on Saturday and Sunday were extended. He was also horrified to see the galleries filled with smoking stoves to keep the gardiens [gallery attendants] warm: 'Get them out ... they will end up burning my conquests!' Equally shocking was the lack of public lavatories, leading to the misuse of the galleries by the unhappy gardiens, who were paid a menial wage, one-tenth of what Denon received.
It was hardly surprising that in 1810 thieves broke in to make off with some priceless tapestries."In September 1802, the Medici Venus--'The glory of Florence'--arrived at the Louvre after a journey of ten months. Rumbling across Europe, the heavy pieces of looted sculpture required special carriages drawn by up to fifteen pairs of oxen. The following March came the first convoy of loot from Naples. Napoleon's greed seems to have known no bounds; in 1810 he declared to a deeply embarrassed Canova, the great Florentine sculptor, 'Here are the principal works of art; only missing is the Farnese Hercules, but we shall have that also.' Deeply shocked, Canova replied, 'Let your Majesty at least leave something in Italy!' It was perhaps amazing that not more was ruined on the journey; describing in 1809 the looting of twenty masterpieces from Spain, Denon reported ominously, 'There has been more damage, due to negligence in the packing, of the first dispatch of Italian primitives,' The arrivals from Italy continued until the end of the Empire."[Many were returned after the fall of Napoleon at Waterloo]
Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris, Pan Books, Copyright 2002 by Alistair Horne, pp. 205-206.
To run this Musee Napoleon for him, the Emperor found one of those extraordinary geniuses ... Vivant Denon. ... The notion of a gallery open to the public stemmed from the historically much maligned Louis XVI. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the royal collections had been kept for the private delectation of the court and of privileged visitors. ...
It was Louis XVI himself who suggested reuniting everything that the crown possessed of 'beauty in painting and sculpture' under the name of 'museum' (a concept borrowed from England). Explained Denon, 'The French Republic, by its force, the superiority of its light and its artists, is the only country in the world which could provide an inviolable asylum to these masterpieces.' "
Napoleon took a great interest--amounting to interference--in the museum named after him. On his return from [the Battle of] Jena in September 1806, he was already complaining about the queues on a Saturday afternoon--with the result that the hours on Saturday and Sunday were extended. He was also horrified to see the galleries filled with smoking stoves to keep the gardiens [gallery attendants] warm: 'Get them out ... they will end up burning my conquests!' Equally shocking was the lack of public lavatories, leading to the misuse of the galleries by the unhappy gardiens, who were paid a menial wage, one-tenth of what Denon received.
It was hardly surprising that in 1810 thieves broke in to make off with some priceless tapestries."In September 1802, the Medici Venus--'The glory of Florence'--arrived at the Louvre after a journey of ten months. Rumbling across Europe, the heavy pieces of looted sculpture required special carriages drawn by up to fifteen pairs of oxen. The following March came the first convoy of loot from Naples. Napoleon's greed seems to have known no bounds; in 1810 he declared to a deeply embarrassed Canova, the great Florentine sculptor, 'Here are the principal works of art; only missing is the Farnese Hercules, but we shall have that also.' Deeply shocked, Canova replied, 'Let your Majesty at least leave something in Italy!' It was perhaps amazing that not more was ruined on the journey; describing in 1809 the looting of twenty masterpieces from Spain, Denon reported ominously, 'There has been more damage, due to negligence in the packing, of the first dispatch of Italian primitives,' The arrivals from Italy continued until the end of the Empire."[Many were returned after the fall of Napoleon at Waterloo]
Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris, Pan Books, Copyright 2002 by Alistair Horne, pp. 205-206.
Concerts
"The modern classical-music performance, as audiences have come to know it and sometimes to love it, adheres to a fairly rigid format. ... The audience is expected to remain quiet for the duration of each work, and those who applaud between movements may face embarrassment. Around ten o'clock, the audience claps for two or three minutes, the performers bow two or three times, and all go home. ...
"[However], before 1900 concerts assumed a quite different form. ... Here is [James] Johnson's evocation of a night at the Paris Opéra in the years before the French Revolution:" 'While most were in their places by the end of the first act, the continuous movement and low din of conversation never really stopped. Lackeys and young bachelors milled about in the crowded and often boisterous parterre, the floor-level pit to which only men were admitted. Princes of the blood and dukes visited among themselves in the highly visible first-row boxes.
Worldly abbés chatted happily with ladies in jewels on the second level, occasionally earning indecent shouts from the parterre when their conversation turned too cordial. And lovers sought the dim heights of the third balcony--the paradise--away from the probing lorgnettes.'"In other words, the opera served mainly as a playground for the aristocracy.
The nobles often possessed considerable musical knowledge, but they refrained from paying overt attention to what the musicians were doing. Indeed, silent listening in the modern sense was deemed déclassé. ...'Public concerts didn't become widespread until after 1800, and well into the nineteenth century they took the form of "miscellanies"--eclectic affairs at which all kinds of music were played before audiences that seldom sat still or quieted down. ... Applause usually erupted after movements, and at times during them, if the audience heard something it particularly liked."What changed? ...
To some extent, these changes can be explained in anthropological terms: by applauding here and not applauding there, the bourgeois were signalling their membership in a social and cultural élite. As Johnson points out, they felt obliged to reconfirm that status from year to year, since, unlike the aristocrats of yore, they lived in fear of going back down the ladder. 'The bourgeoisie isn't a class, it's a position,' the Journal des Débats advised. 'You acquire it, you lose it.' Attending concerts became a kind of performance in itself, a dance of decorum."
Alex Ross, "Why So Serious?" The New Yorker, September 8, 2008, pp. 79-80.
"[However], before 1900 concerts assumed a quite different form. ... Here is [James] Johnson's evocation of a night at the Paris Opéra in the years before the French Revolution:" 'While most were in their places by the end of the first act, the continuous movement and low din of conversation never really stopped. Lackeys and young bachelors milled about in the crowded and often boisterous parterre, the floor-level pit to which only men were admitted. Princes of the blood and dukes visited among themselves in the highly visible first-row boxes.
Worldly abbés chatted happily with ladies in jewels on the second level, occasionally earning indecent shouts from the parterre when their conversation turned too cordial. And lovers sought the dim heights of the third balcony--the paradise--away from the probing lorgnettes.'"In other words, the opera served mainly as a playground for the aristocracy.
The nobles often possessed considerable musical knowledge, but they refrained from paying overt attention to what the musicians were doing. Indeed, silent listening in the modern sense was deemed déclassé. ...'Public concerts didn't become widespread until after 1800, and well into the nineteenth century they took the form of "miscellanies"--eclectic affairs at which all kinds of music were played before audiences that seldom sat still or quieted down. ... Applause usually erupted after movements, and at times during them, if the audience heard something it particularly liked."What changed? ...
To some extent, these changes can be explained in anthropological terms: by applauding here and not applauding there, the bourgeois were signalling their membership in a social and cultural élite. As Johnson points out, they felt obliged to reconfirm that status from year to year, since, unlike the aristocrats of yore, they lived in fear of going back down the ladder. 'The bourgeoisie isn't a class, it's a position,' the Journal des Débats advised. 'You acquire it, you lose it.' Attending concerts became a kind of performance in itself, a dance of decorum."
Alex Ross, "Why So Serious?" The New Yorker, September 8, 2008, pp. 79-80.
George Gershwin
"In the spring of 1928, George Gershwin, [born in the Lower East Side slums of Manhattan and now the acclaimed] creator of Rhapsody in Blue, toured Europe and met the leading composers of the day. In Vienna, he called at the home of Alban Berg, whose blood-soaked, dissonant, sublimely dark opera Wozzeck had had its premiere in Berlin three years earlier.
To welcome his American visitor, Berg arranged for a string quartet to perform his Lyric Suite, in which Viennese lyricism was refined into something like a dangerous narcotic."Gershwin then went to the piano to play some of his own songs. He hesitated. Berg's work had left him awestruck. Were his own pieces worthy of these murky, opulent surroundings? Berg looked at him sternly and said, 'Mr. Gershwin, music is music.' ... Berg's Wozzeck is, for some, one of the most gripping operas ever written. Gershwin thought so, and emulated it in [his masterwork] Porgy and Bess, not least in the hazy chords that float through 'Summerime.'
For others, Wozzeck is a welter of ugliness."DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy had long interested Gershwin as a subject. ... Gershwin later said that he liked the story because of its mix of humor and drama; it allowed him to shift between Broadway-style song-and-dance numbers and vocal-symphonic writing in the style of Wozzeck.
"Porgy begins with an introductory orchestral and choral explosion in which Gershwin shows off what he has learned from his experiments in modern music. ...
The texture then subsides toward a summery, humid kind of stillness. A new ostinato gets under way, one of alternating half-diminished sevenths, recalling Wozzeck again-Marie's song of 'Eia popeia' to her child. Gershwin even uses his chords for the same scenic purpose, to accompany a mother's soothing lullaby. If the kid from the Lower East Side seems in danger of losing himself in European arcana, there is no reason to worry. We are listening to one of the best-loved melodies of the twentieth century: 'Summertime, and the living is easy ..."Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, Copyright 2007 by Alex Ross, pp. xi-xii, 148- 149.
To welcome his American visitor, Berg arranged for a string quartet to perform his Lyric Suite, in which Viennese lyricism was refined into something like a dangerous narcotic."Gershwin then went to the piano to play some of his own songs. He hesitated. Berg's work had left him awestruck. Were his own pieces worthy of these murky, opulent surroundings? Berg looked at him sternly and said, 'Mr. Gershwin, music is music.' ... Berg's Wozzeck is, for some, one of the most gripping operas ever written. Gershwin thought so, and emulated it in [his masterwork] Porgy and Bess, not least in the hazy chords that float through 'Summerime.'
For others, Wozzeck is a welter of ugliness."DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy had long interested Gershwin as a subject. ... Gershwin later said that he liked the story because of its mix of humor and drama; it allowed him to shift between Broadway-style song-and-dance numbers and vocal-symphonic writing in the style of Wozzeck.
"Porgy begins with an introductory orchestral and choral explosion in which Gershwin shows off what he has learned from his experiments in modern music. ...
The texture then subsides toward a summery, humid kind of stillness. A new ostinato gets under way, one of alternating half-diminished sevenths, recalling Wozzeck again-Marie's song of 'Eia popeia' to her child. Gershwin even uses his chords for the same scenic purpose, to accompany a mother's soothing lullaby. If the kid from the Lower East Side seems in danger of losing himself in European arcana, there is no reason to worry. We are listening to one of the best-loved melodies of the twentieth century: 'Summertime, and the living is easy ..."Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, Copyright 2007 by Alex Ross, pp. xi-xii, 148- 149.
Lotte Lenya
"Weill grew up a shy, serious boy, devoted to music. ... The transformation of his style was quickened by Lotte Lenya. ... Weill became romantically and professionally involved with Lenya starting in 1924, and was never the same afterward. The product of a poor background and an abusive father, she found employment variously as a dancer, a singer, an actress, a stage extra, an acrobat, and briefly, a prostitute--a profession that ensnared countless German and Austrian women during the years of chaos and inflation. Weill's music began to resemble her voice--that famously unpolished, cutting, wearily expressive instrument...."
Brecht loved outlaws, thugs, men of no principles. In his adolescence, he idolized the turn-of-the-century Austrian playwright Frank Wedekind, who shocked Vienna with his scabrous, criminal appearance. ... Macheath, a.k.a. Mackie, the antihero of The Threepenny Opera, is the nastiest of Brecht's homunculi. ... He is at once charming and menacing, mainly because of the musical number that introduces him: 'Die Moritat vom Mackie Messer,' otherwise known as 'Mack the Knife.'
This most famous of Weimar songs takes the form of a 'murder ballad,' a catalog of killings. Macheath is revealed not merely as a high-living highwayman but as an apparent psychopath who kills as much for pleasure as for financial gain. Schmul Meier has disappeared, along with many rich men; Jenny Towler is found with a knife in her breast; seven children die in a great fire in Soho; a young girl is raped. [The libretto reflects the] Weimar culture which then exhibited an unhealthy fixation on the figure of the serial or sexual killer. ..."
In 1962 Lenya appeared in the revue Brecht on Brecht at the Theater de Lys in New York's Greenwich Village. a young Minnesota-born singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan came to see the show and found himself mesmerized by Lenya's singing of 'Pirate Jenny,' in which a prostitute fantasizes revenge on the men who exploit her. 'The audience was the 'gentlemen' in the song,' Dylan wrote in his autobiography, Chronicles. ... 'It wasn't a protest or topical song and their was no love of people in it.' ..."In the spirit of Brecht and Weill, Dylan proceeded to carve his own phrases into the minds of late-twentieth-century listeners: 'The answer is blowin' in the wind,' 'A hard rain's a-gonna fall,' 'The times they are a-changin' .' The last was a direct quotation from one of Brecht's lyrics for Hanns Eisler. The spirit of Berlin played on."Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Copyright 2007 by Alex Ross, pp. 187-194.
Brecht loved outlaws, thugs, men of no principles. In his adolescence, he idolized the turn-of-the-century Austrian playwright Frank Wedekind, who shocked Vienna with his scabrous, criminal appearance. ... Macheath, a.k.a. Mackie, the antihero of The Threepenny Opera, is the nastiest of Brecht's homunculi. ... He is at once charming and menacing, mainly because of the musical number that introduces him: 'Die Moritat vom Mackie Messer,' otherwise known as 'Mack the Knife.'
This most famous of Weimar songs takes the form of a 'murder ballad,' a catalog of killings. Macheath is revealed not merely as a high-living highwayman but as an apparent psychopath who kills as much for pleasure as for financial gain. Schmul Meier has disappeared, along with many rich men; Jenny Towler is found with a knife in her breast; seven children die in a great fire in Soho; a young girl is raped. [The libretto reflects the] Weimar culture which then exhibited an unhealthy fixation on the figure of the serial or sexual killer. ..."
In 1962 Lenya appeared in the revue Brecht on Brecht at the Theater de Lys in New York's Greenwich Village. a young Minnesota-born singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan came to see the show and found himself mesmerized by Lenya's singing of 'Pirate Jenny,' in which a prostitute fantasizes revenge on the men who exploit her. 'The audience was the 'gentlemen' in the song,' Dylan wrote in his autobiography, Chronicles. ... 'It wasn't a protest or topical song and their was no love of people in it.' ..."In the spirit of Brecht and Weill, Dylan proceeded to carve his own phrases into the minds of late-twentieth-century listeners: 'The answer is blowin' in the wind,' 'A hard rain's a-gonna fall,' 'The times they are a-changin' .' The last was a direct quotation from one of Brecht's lyrics for Hanns Eisler. The spirit of Berlin played on."Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Copyright 2007 by Alex Ross, pp. 187-194.
Samuel Barber
Samuel Barber (1910-1981) was an American composer of classical music. Barber's Adagio has become recognized as one of the truly powerful and enduring pieces of the twentieth century
(Samuel) "Barber had met and fallen in love with his fellow- student at the Curtis Institute, the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, in the autumn of 1928 and--though you would hardly believe they were more than devoted friends from Barbara B. Heyman's otherwise thorough biography--they were to share a house as lovers for over thirty years. The summer of 1936, which Barber spent spent with Menotti in the Austrian mountain village of St. Wolfgang, was one of the most idyllic times either could remember, and it was toward the end of their stay there that Barber wrote to the cellist Orlando Cole: 'I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today--it is a knockout!' When, encouraged by Arturo Toscanini, Barber made a five-part arrangement of the string quartet's adagio for string orchestra and Toscanini duly conducted it, the Adagio entered the orchestral repertoire ... [and] won the praise of Barber's contemporaries. Copland praised its 'sense of continuity, the steadiness of the flow, the satisfaction of the arch that it creates from beginning to end,' asserting that 'it comes straight from the heart,' while William Schuman thought 'it works because it's so precise emotionally ... you're not aware of any technique at all.' And Virgil Thomson came closest to the reason why when he described it as 'a detailed love scene' --a fact which its subsequent memorial usage has all but obliterated."
David Nice, Elegy: Music for Strings, Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Jarvi, Notes on the Music, Chandos Records
Nico Muhly
"Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English composers of religious music, in particular William Byrd and John Taverner, are among Muhly's (Nico Muhly, the 26-year-old American classical and electroacoustic composing prodigy) chief influences, though he also draws musical inspiration from the spare repetitions of Philip Glass and Steve Reich and from the off-kilter rhythms of songs by Björk, whose recordings he has worked on. ... "
Philip Glass, for whom Muhly has worked since his sophomore year of college, at Columbia, says that he finds in Muhly 'a curious ear, a restless listening, and a maker of works. He's doing his own thing.' (Although Muhly is much in demand as a composer in his own right, he still has a day job, which includes feeding Glass's film-music manuscripts into a computer program that can play the scores.)
Following the model of Glass, Muhly prefers to have his work performed as often as possible, and in as many different contexts as possible, rather than refining his compositions within the academy. In the past year, American Ballet Theatre staged a ballet, 'From Here on Out,' on which Muhly collaborated with Benjamin Millepied; the Boston Pops premièred his composition 'Wish You Were Here'; and he made his Carnegie Hall début as a composer, when a program of his works, which he paired with Renaissance choral music, was performed in Zankel Hall. ..."
When Muhly composes, the last thing he thinks about is the actual notes that musicians will play. He begins with books and documents, YouTube videos and illuminated manuscripts. He meditates on this material, digesting its ironies and appreciating its aesthetics. Meanwhile, he devises an emotional scheme for the piece-the journey on which he intends to lead his listener. ..."Muhly usually composes on sheets of manuscript paper, though sometimes he also uses an electronic keyboard, which sits on his desk next to two large computer monitors. One afternoon when I was watching him at work, one screen displayed two pages of a score, and the other showed his e-mail inbox and several open instant-message chats with friends. (Muhly does not require silence or seclusion while working and, in addition to conducting multiple online conversations while composing, often has several online games of Scrabble under way.) ..."
Muhly started to play the organ in addition to the piano; one day when he was ten, his mother took him to Trinity Church, in Boston, where she knew the assistant organist, ... [who] asked if he would like to play something. He sat down and his feet couldn't even reach the pedals. He said, 'I am going to play some Bach,' and this big sound came roaring out of the organ. There were all these people taking a tour of the church who were saying, 'Who's playing?,' because he was only four feet tall. That afternoon, [she] recalls, Muhly started composing his first piece of music, a setting of a Kyrie for choir, on a napkin at a coffee shop in Harvard Square. 'He wrote it vertically- all the parts simultaneously,' she says. 'He was thinking in chords, rather than in individual lines. He said, 'That's how I hear it.' ' "Rebecca Mead, "Eerily Composed," The New Yorker, February 11 & 18, 2008, pp. 74- 78.
Richard Strauss
"When Richard Strauss conducted his opera Salome on May 16, 1906, in the Austrian city of Graz, several crowned heads of European music gathered to witness the event. The premiere of Salome had taken place in Dresden five months earlier, and word had gotten out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale--an ultra-dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by a British degenerate whose name was not mentioned in polite company, a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it from the Court Opera in Vienna. ... Gustav Mahler, the director of the Vienna Opera, attended with his wife, the beautiful and controversial Alma.
The bold young composer Arnold Schoenberg arrived from Vienna with ... no fewer than six of his pupils. ..." 'The city was in a great state of excitement.' [the critic Ernst] Decsey wrote. ... [He] fueled anticipation with a high-flown preview article acclaiming Strauss's 'tone- color world,' his 'polyrhythms and polyphony,' his 'breakup of the narrow old tonality,' his 'fetish ideal of an Omni-tonality.' ..."[At the end of the concert] the crowd roared its approval--that was the most shocking thing. 'Nothing more satanic and artistic has been seen on the German opera stage,' Decsey wrote admiringly. ...
Salome went on to be performed in some twenty-five different cities. The triumph was so complete that Strauss could afford to laugh off criticism from Kaiser Wilhelm II. 'I am sorry that Strauss composed this Salome,' the Kaiser reportedly said. 'Normally I'm very keen on him, but this is going to do him a lot of damage.'
Strauss would relate this story and add with a flourish: 'Thanks to that damage I was able to build my villa in Garmisch!'"On the train back to Vienna, Mahler expressed bewilderment over is colleague's success. He considered Salome a significant and audacious piece--'one of the great masterworks of our time,' he later said--and he could not understand why the public took an immediate liking to it. Genius and popularity were, he apparently thought, incompatible. ... 'I was never revolutionary,' Arnold Schoenberg once said. 'The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!' "Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, Copyright 2007 by Alex Ross, pp.3-18.
'Vincent Van Gogh
"Every Sunday the family, clad in black and bearing flowers, set off to the little cemetery at Groot-Zundert, where they went directly from the gate to a grave marked 'Vincent Wilhelm Van Gogh 1852.' A single date to mark a birth and a death, for this was the grave of a child six weeks old. As the father, mother, two sons and three daughters prayed, the eldest of the boys--also called Vincent Wilhelm--stared intensely at the gravestone and the name, his brother's, that was also his own."
The young Vincent Wilhelm was born March 30, 1853, a year to the day after the death of his brother. Was his destiny to be that of an earthly replacement for the child now lying at his feet beneath the slab of gray stone? To take the place of another? Or was he himself the other his identity had usurped?
Each Sunday little Vincent Van Gogh--the new Vincent--asked himself the same question, not daring to look at his mother with her hands joined and her eyes brimming with tears. Whom was she praying for? The dead child? Or for Vincent himself, the substitute? As they silently made their way home, Vincent, troubled and riven with doubt, stayed huddled against his younger brother Theo, born May 1, 1857, with whom he was very close.
The dismal ritual was repeated every Sunday for years. Every March 30, they celebrated Vincent's birthday, but who were the celebrations really for? The dead child or the boy who was now ten years old? ..."All his life Vincent would struggle against a brother more insistently present than if he had actually been alive, as his parents inevitably measured him against the virtues they attributed to the lost child."
Pierre Cabanne, Van Gogh, Terrail, 2006, pp. 7-8.
The young Vincent Wilhelm was born March 30, 1853, a year to the day after the death of his brother. Was his destiny to be that of an earthly replacement for the child now lying at his feet beneath the slab of gray stone? To take the place of another? Or was he himself the other his identity had usurped?
Each Sunday little Vincent Van Gogh--the new Vincent--asked himself the same question, not daring to look at his mother with her hands joined and her eyes brimming with tears. Whom was she praying for? The dead child? Or for Vincent himself, the substitute? As they silently made their way home, Vincent, troubled and riven with doubt, stayed huddled against his younger brother Theo, born May 1, 1857, with whom he was very close.
The dismal ritual was repeated every Sunday for years. Every March 30, they celebrated Vincent's birthday, but who were the celebrations really for? The dead child or the boy who was now ten years old? ..."All his life Vincent would struggle against a brother more insistently present than if he had actually been alive, as his parents inevitably measured him against the virtues they attributed to the lost child."
Pierre Cabanne, Van Gogh, Terrail, 2006, pp. 7-8.
The Trapp Family Singers
"Vincent J. Donehue was a former actor and Tony award-winning stage director who had gone to work at Paramount late in 1956. One day he was asked to look at a German film called The Trapp Family Singers which had been a big success in Europe and South America, with a view to his directing a movie in English based upon it and starring Audrey Hepburn. The German film told the life story of Maria, Baroness von Trapp, and her beginnings as a postulant nun in Austria who was sent to be governess to the seven children of the widowed Georg von Trapp.
They were later married and escaped from Austria just before the Anschluss, finding their way across the Alps into Switzerland and from there to the United States, where they became famous as the singing Trapps." 'It was in many ways amateurish,' Donehue said of the film, 'but I was terribly moved by the whole idea of it, almost sobbing.'
He saw it immediately as a perfect vehicle for Mary Martin, whose husband, Richard Halliday, was one of his closest friends. When Audrey Hepburn's interest in the project faded, Paramount lost its enthusiasm and let its option lapse. Donehue sent the German film to Richard Halliday. Both he and Mary Martin loved the film. '
The idea was just irresistible,' Mary said, 'a semi-Cinderella story, but true.'"Actually, it wasn't true at all. The real-life Maria Rainer had had a loveless childhood as the ward of a provincial judge and joined a monastery where, far from being a ray of sunshine, she became so ill she was sent 'outside' to be a governess to one of Georg von Trapp's daughters, who was bedridden. Unlike the music-hating martinet portrayed in the [Broadway] version, von Trapp was a loving parent who encouraged his children to play instruments and sing. Nor did they escape over the Alps pursued by the Nazis; they took a train to Italy and reached America by way of England."Nevertheless, there was not the slightest doubt in Halliday's or Mary Martin's minds that it would make a great musical, and both agreed from the outset that they wanted Rodgers and Hammerstein to produce it. But there were all sorts of obstacles to be overcome before anything like a Broadway show could be mounted. First, Halliday had to try to locate Maria von Trapp and her children, all of whose permissions would be required if they were to be portrayed live on stage. The Baroness, however, was hard to find. She was on a world tour, establishing missions in the South Seas. Letters addressed to her in Australia, Tahiti, Samoa, and other locations failed to reach her. In addition, the seven von Trapp children were scattered in various places around the world and were proving just as elusive. "
At this point, Halliday's lawyer Bill Fitelson brought in producer Leland Hayward, and Hayward became as enthusiastic as everyone else about the possibilities of the story. Together, Hayward and Fitelson chased all over Europe picking up hints and clues as to the whereabouts of the Trapp children. By the autumn of 1957, they had all the necessary permissions sewn together. The seven von Trapp children had been traced and had signed on the dotted line. The contract with Baroness von Trapp was finalized in a hospital ward in Innsbruck, where she was recuperating from malaria contracted in New Guinea. Leland Hayward, who spoke no German, concluded his negotiations with the representative of the German film company, who spoke no English, in Yiddish!"
Frederick Nolan, The Sound of Their Music, Applause Books, Copyright 2002 by Frederick Nolan, pp. 244-246
Marco Polo and the Renaissance
"[Upon their return from China], the three Polos received respect from their fellow citizens, with Marco singled out for special attention. 'All the young men went every day continuously to visit and converse with Messer Marco,' Giambattista Ramusio claimed. 'who was most charming and gracious, and to ask of him matters concerning Cathay (China) and the Great Khan, and he responded with so much kindness that all felt themselves to be in a certain manner indebted to him.' "
It is easy to understand why Marco attracted notice. The significance of the inventions that he brought back from China, or which he later described in his Travels, cannot be overstated. At first, Europeans regarded these technological marvels with disbelief, but eventually they adopted them."Paper money, virtually unknown in the West until Marco's return, revolutionized finance and commerce throughout the West."Coal, another item that had caught Marco's attention in China, provided a new and relatively efficient source of heat to an energy-starved Europe."
Eyeglasses (in the form of ground lenses), which some accounts say he brought back with him, became accepted as a remedy for failing eyesight. In addition, lenses gave rise to the telescope - which in turn revolutionized naval battles, since it allowed combatants to view ships at a great distance - and the microscope. Two hundred years later, Galileo used the telescope - based on the same technology - to revolutionize science and cosmology by supporting and disseminating the Copernican theory that Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun."
Gunpowder, which the Chinese had employed for at least three centuries, revolutionized European warfare as armies exchanged their lances, swords, and crossbows for cannon, portable harquebuses, and pistols."Marco brought back gifts of a more personal nature as well. The golden paiza, or passport, given to him by Kublai Khan had seen him through years of travel, war, and hardship. Marco kept it still, and would to the end of his days. He also brought back a Mongol servant, whom he named Peter, a living reminder of the status he had once enjoyed in a far-off land."In all, it is difficult to imagine the Renaissance - or, for that matter, the modern world - without the benefit of Marco Polo's example of cultural transmission between East and West."
Laurence Bergreen, Marco Polo, Knopf, Copyright 2007 by Laurence Bergreen, pp. 320-321.
Cindy Sherman
"In 1978, at the age of 23, Cindy Sherman began her landmark photographic series Untitled Film Stills [now in the permanent Museum of Modern Art collection, New York City]. In each small-format black and white image, Sherman plays a different role--prim office worker, suburban housewife, glamorous femme fatale--in a minutely staged psychologically intense drama. Although she is the only character in shot, her transformation in each image is so complete that her personal identity disappears, and instead of a series of self-portraits, we have a comprehensive repertoire of 20th-century female stereotypes. "
For most of the 1980s, Sherman continued to use her body as her central prop, working with colour photography to explore aspects of horror, violence , and the grotesque. The Fairy Tales, 1984-86, Disaster Series, 1987-89, and Sex Pictures, 1992, employed an array of prosthetic teeth, snouts and breasts, mysterious liquids, rotting food and anatomically rearranged mannequin limbs to portray nightmarish visions of deformity and scenes of sexual violence, half seen, half imagined.
A palpable tension exists between the pictures' seductive, vividly coloured surfaces and their disgusting, anxiety-producing subject matter. This sense of anxiety is apparent throughout Sherman's work. Her most recent series Untitled features twelve new fictional characters--all over-tanned, over-dressed, heavily made-up women 'of a certain age.' Occupying the narrow terrain between pathos and parody, these large-format colour portraits examine women's attempts to defy, deny or at least slow down old age, while suggesting the small disappointments and minor tragedies embedded in each character's personal history."
Uta Grosenick & Burkhard Riemschneider, Art Now, Taschen, 2002, pp. 288.
Translating thought into design
Susan Hilferty, award-winning costume designer whose credits include Into the Woods, Wicked, Hamlet, and many others, speaks about her profession and her work on specific plays. Hilferty also chairs the Department of Design for Stage/Film at New York University:"
Translating thought into design is the hard part. If we make the decision that this is a world where Hamlet has a sense of paranoia, but there's real tension in the court caused by everybody being nervous about losing their head or job, I could start to use that. I probably wouldn't go so far as to say that I'm going to make it like Hitler's Germany. I wouldn't necessarily use that as a specific reference, but I would start weighing up the qualities of different cultures and places that give me access to that kind of paranoia. Stalin is another example. ..."[Y]ou have to ... understand real history so that you can identify what you would do in [the play] 1776. Then the [next] part is to take all that information and abstract it so that it's not a specific time or place. You have to have the skill to extract a design idea. Designers have to know about history and its relationship to the world, whether it's about the sciences, war, or politics; we have to know about literature, because almost every great play references other great plays. ... I have to deal with an actor who has problem feet and a bad stomach, and insecurities about weight and baldness, but then I'm the one who has to take that actor through the transformation to become somebody else. Actors have to trust that I will not make them look bad. At the same time I have to be confident enough in my choices that I can take them to the place they need to be. It's the greatest compliment when they are finally dressed and say, 'Now I know who I am.' ..."I believe every designer has to think holistically. If I put somebody in black in a white space, that's one thing; if I put somebody in black in a black space, that's a completely different thing; if I put them in candlelight, that's something else. ..."Sometimes you can do something huge with a character. Take Wicked, because it's simple storytelling without a lot of loops in the story. I've got one character who is a kind of ditzy, sweet, woman, and by the end she's a power-hungry killer. I used pictures of Queen Elizabeth I, moving her from this innocent woman to somebody who's got her hair scraped back, structured and powerful. Sometimes you get to tell the story that way."
Babak Ebrahimian, Structured Spaces, Focal Press, 2006, pp. 59-63.
Translating thought into design is the hard part. If we make the decision that this is a world where Hamlet has a sense of paranoia, but there's real tension in the court caused by everybody being nervous about losing their head or job, I could start to use that. I probably wouldn't go so far as to say that I'm going to make it like Hitler's Germany. I wouldn't necessarily use that as a specific reference, but I would start weighing up the qualities of different cultures and places that give me access to that kind of paranoia. Stalin is another example. ..."[Y]ou have to ... understand real history so that you can identify what you would do in [the play] 1776. Then the [next] part is to take all that information and abstract it so that it's not a specific time or place. You have to have the skill to extract a design idea. Designers have to know about history and its relationship to the world, whether it's about the sciences, war, or politics; we have to know about literature, because almost every great play references other great plays. ... I have to deal with an actor who has problem feet and a bad stomach, and insecurities about weight and baldness, but then I'm the one who has to take that actor through the transformation to become somebody else. Actors have to trust that I will not make them look bad. At the same time I have to be confident enough in my choices that I can take them to the place they need to be. It's the greatest compliment when they are finally dressed and say, 'Now I know who I am.' ..."I believe every designer has to think holistically. If I put somebody in black in a white space, that's one thing; if I put somebody in black in a black space, that's a completely different thing; if I put them in candlelight, that's something else. ..."Sometimes you can do something huge with a character. Take Wicked, because it's simple storytelling without a lot of loops in the story. I've got one character who is a kind of ditzy, sweet, woman, and by the end she's a power-hungry killer. I used pictures of Queen Elizabeth I, moving her from this innocent woman to somebody who's got her hair scraped back, structured and powerful. Sometimes you get to tell the story that way."
Babak Ebrahimian, Structured Spaces, Focal Press, 2006, pp. 59-63.
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