Reviews and News:
Jeff Koons gives a big bouquet of ugly to the French: “As if Paris hadn’t suffered enough over the last two years, the city is about to be saddled with an enormous and exceptionally unsightly Jeff Koons sculpture.”
* *
A short history of time travel: “We should be precise about what Wells invented. Other writers had displaced fictional characters through time. Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle fell asleep and woke up twenty years later; Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee got a bump on the head in the late nineteenth century and woke up in King Arthur’s court. (“‘Bridgeport?’ said I, pointing. ‘Camelot,’ said he.”) In Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, the main character dozes off for 113 years and wakes in 2000…The crucial thing about these trips through time is that they are inadvertent. The hero (always a man) has no agency. Wells’s Traveller was different because he built a machine to travel through time on purpose.”
* *
Revisiting Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy at 25.
* *
Katherine A. Powers reviews Robert Harris’s Conclave: “It is 2018, and a pope who resembles the present one in humility, charity, and tolerance has died unexpectedly in his sleep. Cardinals from all over the world are assembling in Rome to choose his successor. The media are slavering, ‘reporters and photographers . . . calling out to the cardinals, like tourists at a zoo trying to persuade the animals to come closer.’ Armed guards, snipers, and surface-to-air missiles have been deployed against the threat of terrorist attack. Carpenters and technicians are preparing the Sistine Chapel for the electoral proceedings, and a number of cardinals begin to position themselves to step into the papal shoes. Factions and coalitions emerge in different permutations: progressive and reactionary parties, combining and splitting with the Italian, Third World, and North American contingents. Beneath it all, churning relentlessly, are the forces of what we may call the deep Curia.”
* *
Stravinsky’s lost Funeral Song to receive its first performance in 107 years.
* *
David Hockney to design stained-glass window for the Queen in Westminster Abbey.
* *
Paul Muldoon’s satirical, wives’ tales verse.
* *
Pushkin’s prose: “Pushkin is a terrible model for writers: the prose is lively, amusing, idiomatic, clear, charming. Nobody can write as beautifully as he, so why bother?”
* *
Essay of the Day:
In The London Review of Books, T. J. Clark takes a closer look at the strange socialist-anarchist art of James Ensor:
“It is twenty years since Ensor had a show in London, and another sixty years before that since the Leicester Galleries’ retrospective of 1936 (the artist was still alive, but the handful of years round 1890 when most of his best work had been done must already have seemed remote). Luc Tuymans has chosen wonderfully for the present survey – thirty paintings, fifty merciless drawings and prints – and Antwerp and other Belgian collections have lent with touching generosity. I hope the Belgians will forgive me if I say that looking at Ensor in the Academy struck home as hard as it did partly because the paintings seemed to me to connect so deeply, and so variously, with the line of French art from Delacroix to Cézanne. This is the art from which Ensor drew his strength. I know he was fond of saying in his later years that ‘J’entends ignorer mes influences,’ and ‘Paris m’est totalement inconnue,’ but he did not expect anyone to believe him. His imagery was rooted in the traditions of the Low Countries, with Brueghel and Bosch constant companions; but as a painter – as a colourist, as a manipulator of impasto – Ensor spent his life dreaming of Delacroix and Monticelli and Moreau, and what the Impressionists had done, especially the high-speed Manet of the 1870s. I’m sure he must at some point have seen early Cézannes – The Orgy, perhaps, or Achille Emperaire, or a Temptation of St Anthony – and thought about repeating them in the key of late Turner. But Delacroix was always the presiding genius. The Fall of the Rebel Angels in the show is a wild précis of Delacroix’s Apollo ceiling (with Brueghel in the background). Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise draws from the same source. The great anarchist Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 – too big and fragile to travel to London, but represented by an unrepentant etching Ensor did of it six years later (only the blood-red banner reading ‘Vive la Sociale’ has been suppressed) – recasts Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People as an endless crowd of carnival Crusaders Entering Constantinople.
“Perhaps it is true that an artist’s influences should not interest us much (Ensor’s wish to drop the subject has my sympathy) unless what they give rise to in the work before us is baffling, yet immediately coherent in its own right, and also an achievement that, once seen, appears to upend our view of the tradition being drawn on, putting that tradition in a new light. This is the Ensor effect. Who, without The Intrigue or Skeletons Fighting for the Body of a Hanged Man, would truly have grasped how much it mattered to French painting all through the 19th century – and still in the age of Picasso and de Chirico – that the ordinary, daily, material life of modernity be seen to be haunted by the unreal, the deathly, the disguised, the predatory, the phantasmagoric? The famous tagline Walter Benjamin borrowed from Leopardi – ‘Fashion: Madame Death! Madame Death!’ – seems made for the world Ensor shows.”
* * *
“Ensor is one of the strangest artists to have emerged from a socialist and anarchist milieu – stranger even than Platonov or Pasolini. That socialism of some sort was the context that mattered in his case is clear. The first serious piece of writing about him appeared in 1891 in the socialist journal La Société nouvelle, published in Paris and Brussels: it was written by a novelist friend, Eugène Demolder. When Demolder followed up with a short book a few months later it was titled James Ensor, la mort mystique d’un théologien. (The great Verhaeren, poet of the revolutionary crowd, lent his name to a second monograph in 1908.) You have to work hard to find Demolder’s 1892 subtitle acknowledged in the art-historical literature, but it is important, and only half ironical. In Belgian socialism at fin de siècle, Christ and La Sociale (the anarchists’ codeword for the coming social revolution) were inseparable. Demolder in La Société nouvelle has Ensor’s Christ ‘step down into the crowd and slap the ridiculous bishop with his stigmatised hands’. There is a ferocious Man of Sorrows in the show, painted the same year as Demolder’s essay, whose Christ seems fully capable of doing the job. He is best looked at in tandem with a panel hung nearby, also dated 1891, titled Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring. No doubt the panel’s strip-cartoon pessimism is all-encompassing – ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do’ – but at the same time it resonates specifically with Ostend and class struggle. Ostend in the late 19th century (it was Ensor’s home, and he rarely stirred far from the place) shared its bathing beaches with a hard-scrabble fishing industry – it was Bognor with a large dash of Grimsby. In August 1887 fish packers set on three English boats trying to undersell the locals, and gendarmes shot dead six or more of the rioters, wounding scores of others (the numbers are disputed) before order returned. There is a drawing at the Academy called The Strike, but its first title seems to have been Le Massacre des pêcheurs ostendais. Notice that one of the skeletons in the Pickled Herring picture is sporting a busby. Ensor did a painting in 1892 of fishermen’s wives warming themselves over individual braziers shoved under their skirts, in a room as wintry and miserable as the room in Skeletons Fighting for the Body of a Hanged Man; naturally, skull people peer in through a window. One of them carries a heartless placard: ‘A Mort! – Elles ont mangé trop de poisson.'”
* *
Image of the Day: Golden pheasant
* *
Poem: Timothy Murphy, “Another Advent”
* *
Editor’s Note: Prufrock will return Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday.
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
