Note: There will be no Prufrock next week. Happy holidays to all.
Reviews and News:
Michael Dirda recommends seven murder mysteries.
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Tolstoy on Broadway: “Written by Dave Malloy, The Great Comet is an “electropop opera” based on a seventy-page section of Tolstoy’s War and Peace…Readers of War and Peace will notice the artistic liberties taken: In the novel it is Andrei’s slow, painful death that brings Natasha and Pierre together, and their marriage in the end, while affectionate, is not a Disney climax to a wild love story but the mature resignation of two adults to a stable, less passionate form of love.
But even those who haven’t braved War and Peace will find little in The Great Comet they might have expected, for it is taken from a section of the novel (Volume II, Part V) that isn’t particularly famous. In it, there is no Napoleon, no Alexander I, no General Kutuzov. There is no philosophy of history or theory of warfare, for which the 1,200-page novel is usually known. Indeed, there isn’t a war at all; the show’s opening number begins, ‘There’s a war going on out there somewhere, and Andrei isn’t here,’ and ends, ‘Chandeliers and caviar, the war can’t touch us here!'”
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An engaging account of the birth of The Stranger and its subsequent popularity: “Like the early Hemingway, Camus was able, at least in the first half of The Stranger, to stay on the surface, and because of what is not said, invite us to imagine depth—’impenetrable, incommunicable, sparkling,’ in Sartre’s words. Kaplan shrewdly suggests that The Stranger appealed to American teachers of French who recognized that its simplicity of presentation was ‘a perfect bridge from language study to literature,’ while at the same time students could feel they were in the presence of deep thought even though, or perhaps especially because, the words and sentences stayed on the surface. When, after World War II, the book was published here, the publicity release in Publishers Weekly was a full-page advertisement tying up the novel’s content in a magic word: ‘There is no use trying to talk about new French literature unless you are willing to tackle Existentialism.'”
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A brief survey of writers at Christmas: “Was a literary Victorian honour-bound to be a guest or have a guest or two at Christmas? According to George Eliot (whose intriguing short sketch of Christmas ‘with the snowy hair and ruddy face’ appears in the second chapter of The Mill on the Floss), G. H. Lewes thought it ‘rather wicked for us to eat our turkey and plum-pudding without asking some forlorn person to eat it with us’. ‘But I’m afraid’, she added, one year, ‘we were glad, after all, to find ourselves alone with “the boy”.’ They had already done their sociable duty and gone to hear a performance of The Messiah on Christmas Eve: ‘We felt a considerable minus from the absence of the organ, contrary to advertisement . . . What pitiable people those are who feel no poetry in Christianity!'”
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500 years of Bosch: “In case you missed it, we’re coming to the end of ‘Bosch Year 2016,’ the quincentenary celebration of the death of the late-medieval Dutch master known for his surrealistic images of the hereafter, and particularly for the fantastical hybrid demons that populate his hell. Global commemorative events throughout the year have included major retrospectives in the artist’s hometown, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, in the Netherlands, and at the Prado in Madrid.”
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Adam West, from the 1960s Batman TV series, shows his Batman paintings in an Idaho gallery.
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Karen Wilkin makes the case that less is more when it comes to museum exhibits:
“When an announcement from the Museum of Modern Art arrived recently saying ‘Find serenity in MOMA’s galleries,’ the message was gleefully circulated with a host of ironic comments. Even occasional visitors to Fifty-third Street must have found the pairing of ‘serenity’ and MOMA preposterous. Yet it wasn’t that long ago that museums were spoken of as temples for art, sanctified public spaces that now substituted for cathedrals as places for high-minded experience and uplift—not how we think of most present-day institutions, especially MOMA, with its jam-packed lobby, crowded galleries, and swarming corridors. (Of course, if we think of medieval cathedrals as bustling civic centers, with shops built into the base and all kinds of activity within, the comparison might not seem so far-fetched.) But those of us over a certain age can remember a time when the idea of finding serenity at MOMA would not have seemed bitterly funny. Then, the museum did not resemble a busy airport at peak hours. The galleries were never crowded, except for the curved bay with Monet’s Water Lilies, where the conveniently placed bench was always full of enraptured visitors, and just about anyone in the museum was focused on the art and not, it goes without saying, on cell-phone photos. In those admittedly distant days, an art-obsessed teenager could spend an hour after school with Henri Matisse’s Red Studio, exhilarated by discovering the complex visual relationships among all the disparate objects itemized in the painting. There was also the appealing possibility that the nice-looking boy staring at The Piano Lesson might say something—but that’s another matter.
“And a long time ago. It’s clearly unlikely that ‘serenity’ and ‘MOMA’ are going to find equivalence anytime in the foreseeable future. When Elizabeth Diller, one of the architects of the museum’s current expansion, offered a defense of why an institution with a department of architecture and design decided to raze the former American Folk Art Museum, designed by Billie Tsien and Todd Williams, she said that one of her own aims in conceiving of the latest incarnation of moma was to establish ‘greater connectivity with the street.’ That’s one of the chief qualities, I imagine, that most of us look for, when we go to museums.
“Today’s crowded galleries are, however, less the result of ‘connectivity with the street’ than of the way just about all museums make huge efforts to broaden their audience and increase attendance. Given today’s steadily rising costs of mounting exhibitions and often diminishing funding, increasing the number of visitors (which can boost much-needed public and corporate funding) is obviously necessary, but it’s clearly problematic when it becomes a primary motivation. Not long ago, the Phillips Collection was offered a retrospective of John Graham, the first show in about four decades to survey the work and life of the elusive Russian-born painter, theorist, private dealer, shaman, and expert on African art, a fascinating artist and an influential figure in the New York art world of the 1930s. Duncan Phillips, founder of the museum, was Graham’s first patron, before they feuded, so the Phillips owns many of his most important early works. The show was declined as not being sufficiently ‘box-office.’ So much for the history of the institution.”
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Image of the Day: Furggalp
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Poem: A. M. Juster, “A Seasonal Hymn for the Rest of Us”
