A Play and an Exhibit in the City

I. Glenda Jackson’s Lear

One enters the Cort Theatre on 48th Street to see King Lear beneath a poster with a blurb from a review proclaiming Glenda Jackson the greatest actor in the world. One can hardly blame promoters for superlatives, but many who attend, I would guess, return to the midtown scene ready to second that judgement. The king dominates the stage in a way truly regal.

Her performance includes at times all Lear’s imperious authority, albeit often in rags and tatters. She cackles and roars, rolls her “r”s in aggressive emphasis, only to project confusion the next moment with the purest pathos, and then recoil in proud irony before turning finally to utter tenderness. Jackson’s primary instrument is her masterful manipulation of voice, all the while maintaining perfect clarity. For over three and a half hours attention is riveted on the voice (and the movements) of the star.

Since the language is inevitably by far the strongest element of a Shakespeare production, one is grateful for Ms. Jackson’s masterful delivery. In this show in particular a slightly weaker lead would make even more noisy (if not intrusive) the direction by Sam Gold. The female Lear (and Gloucester) create no issue as both perform effectively in a manner that does not raise issues of gender; the most traditional of critics would have been pleased. That’s all very well, as is the casting of black actors, including the excellent John Douglas Thompson as Kent and, in a less demanding role Ian Lassiter as King of France.

The Duke of Cornwall, played by the deaf Russell Harvard, is another matter. Michael Arden, in the added role of his aide, translates the dialogue into American Sign Language for him and speaks Cornwall’s own lines after receiving them in ASL. Yet the signs could hardly be useful to hearing-impaired audience members as Cornwall is, of course, not on stage at all times. Thus Gold created a highly distracting business which adds nothing whatever to the characterization. I suppose it gains him a few extra credits on some multicultural rating board somewhere, but it seemed to weaken Cornwall’s scenes. The fact that he appears in a kilt does not help either (though I am aware that Cornish kilt enthusiasts do exist).

The rest of the production was able to quite keep pace with its star. Sean Carvajal’s Edgar is on point. Jayne Houdyshell’s Glouchester is affecting and convincing. Cordelia and the fool are admirably represented by Ruth Wilson. I thought that Pedro Pascal in the role of Edmund sometimes adopted odd and ineffective, though clearly deliberate, phrasing that for me vitiated some powerful lines. I thought Aisling O’Sullivan as Regan sounded peculiar, as though her alliance with a deaf man had somehow refracted her own speech. (Hilton Als in The New Yorker points out that each of the daughters unaccountably speaks in a different accent: Irish, English, American.)

The music by Philip Glass was often effective, particularly in playing up the sentiment, though it seemed at time adventitious. Miriam Buether’s gilded set, clearly meant to suggest the obsession with wealth in contemporary America and its foremost exponent, a bizarre president. The temptation was understandable, but unfortunately the analogy between Lear and Trump is not only very imperfect. Worse, as far as it goes, the comparison serves to weaken our sympathy for a king who cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, while Shakespeare’s play is all about cultivating sympathy and love.



II. Hilma af Klint

There can be no question that the “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” show at the Guggenheim took the city by storm. The talk of the town for months, the exhibit set an attendance record for the museum, led to a thirty-four per cent increase in memberships and set the cash registers in the shop to ringing. Her story, by now familiar, is compelling. An accomplished painter within the conventions of her time, she privately painted abstractions (as understood in early twentieth century European art) when no one else was doing so and then asked that these innovative works be withheld from exhibition until twenty years after her death. As it happens, she did not receive a one-woman show until 1988 – a wait of forty years. Prior to that her paintings had received their first modern exhibition in the 1986 Los Angeles County Museum of Art show that might from its title have centered on her: “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985.” At the present time it does her no harm as well that she was a occultist who, with four other women, sought spiritual advancement through courting spirits in séances and the like. Her backstory in itself is irresistible.

Perhaps reacting a bit against this enthusiasm, I had been slightly skeptical about the show and did not attend until the last day when those without passes waited for hours to enter galleries packed to the maximum. All the noise about her superseding Kandinsky (or Mondrian or Malevich or one or both of the Arps) as the first abstractionist seemed to me to ignore the evident fact that abstract art has always existed; in fact, simple lines and forms precede the lovely naturalism of the best-known palaeolithic painting. Then there is Muslim art and all the rest. Secondly, her version of occult spirituality involving communication with the dead as well as a roster of “higher masters” holds for me little appeal. The current vogue for magic and the occult, I thought, might be magnifying a curiosity into a significant artist. Further, the recovery of previously neglected female artists, while overdue and salutary, is not infallibly rewarding.

I did make it to the show on the very last day, in part because I had heard so many acquaintances rave about its power, and I found myself immediately convinced. At the beginning from the bottom one comes first to a set of the Paintings for the Temple she believed she had been commissioned to create by Gregor, her spirit guide. Despite being a practicing Lutheran, she apparently felt that her abstractions would bring people’s consciousness upward toward the divine. Whether that occurs or not I cannot say, but for me it is sufficient that I was struck with wonder at the first group, a series of large canvases named for life’s stages from conception to old age. Especially because of the size the work was overwhelming.

Before going, I had the wrong impression, based on a few images in reviews that af Klint’s designs were largely symmetrical and perhaps a bit stolid. As everyone who has seen the show knows, I was altogether mistaken. These paintings (and many of the rest) were energetic, almost effervescent with a generally light palette, sometimes close to pastel, filled with circles and curves and organic forms. Simply to see them suggested no simple joy but a sort of elated and majestic gravity, like looking through a powerful microscope or telescope and the workings of the cosmos. Gazing at the large images, one felt uplifted. They were even pretty without conceding profundity.

This initial sight of perhaps the most powerful group in the show was profound. The artist claimed to have made these works not only at the behest of someone beyond and above, but without the intervention of her own will. They were, according to her, automatic paintings of the sort the Surrealists began to talk about several years later and in the end talked about more often than actually executed . Though af Klint later assumed more conscious control of her work, she retained an extraordinarily visionary quality in later works.

Though many of her forms are highly expressive without resembling anything identifiable, there are certain recurring symbols such as astrological signs and representational motifs such as the snail forms and the swans. I, for one, would have appreciated translations of the words and phrases that sometimes appear. Such hermeneutic “anchors” provide useful bases for reading the images, but for me the primary reaction was affective, a sort of poised elation, a sense that one has glimpsed with af Klint, even if only vaguely and intuitively and at second hand, the workings of the universe.

Art can do no more. It need not distract us if the Guggenheim is doing a brisk business in ouija boards, tarot cards, and a beginner's guide to astrology "for the modern mystic.” A visitor may or may not accept the use of the word “mystic” there, but the show itself has not been oversold. This is the real thing. The exhibit is less important, though, for its occult educational value or its rewriting of the art history of the opening of the twentieth century than it is for inherent value. These are powerful paintings which provide the viewer immediate pleasure and invite extended study.

In case anyone is looking for a sign from the Beyond for the show’s rightness, it happens that af Klint described visitors to the visionary temple of her imagination as ascending a spiral ramp to the apex of Ultimate Reality which, of course, is precisely the design of the Guggenheim.