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.

The Power of Picasso’s Sculpture

     The current show of Picasso’s sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art provides, as all who have commented have noted, a rare opportunity to have a fresh look at the work of the artist who dominated so much of the twentieth century. A considerable number of the works are being shown for the first time in this country, many on loan from the Musée Picasso in Paris. The artist was not trained in sculpture, and he kept many of his three-dimensional works in his own possession – they are often prominent in photographs of his studio. Though never for long a central focus of his work, he regularly returned to work in bronze, pottery, and plaster, often using found objects throughout his lengthy career, and viewing this extraordinary collection of objects does not so much as inspire new insights as remind the critic of why Picasso’s oeuvre is so much more powerful than much art since. The great innovator exemplifies the most classic values: emotional strength, vitality, traditional formal aesthetics, and a sort of soaring and unpredictable spirit that might emerge in one moment as wit and in another as insight. Even while participating in Cubism, primitivism, Surrealism, and socially conscious art, Picasso reminds us with the deft dodges and relentless dashes of his unique sensibility. His work could be invigorated by a manifesto yet it would never be contained within the confines of any theoretical program. In our own belatedness, even measured against a hundred years ago, I fear that nothing retains the power to arrest the viewer in the same way. Even were such impact possible today, few artists could make the kind of commanding use of space as one sees Picasso doing here in brand new ways in every room of the exhibit.
     As abstraction arose in Dada and came to dominance in New York following World War II, Picasso explored its possibilities but always retained links to figuration. No admirer of Arp’s voluptuously biomorphic forms or Brancusi’s elegant imaginative leaps can doubt the potential for emotional power in altogether abstract work (familiar as well to listeners to Beethoven quartets), but for Picasso ever since his Cubist portraits, the tension between the artist’s view of a real-world object and the viewer’s is a significant element in the work . Drawing a pencil line on a brown paper bag, piling sand in the middle of a room, or sitting opposite a stranger in a gallery (no matter how prestigious the space) do not demand any investment of artistic intention nor can they offer significant aesthetic pleasure.
     One hundred and forty works, nearly one fifth of Picasso’s sculptures, are on display in New York. Every viewer will have passionate favorites. Convinced that the value of each work of art is not inherent and automatic but rather is constituted in the consumer’s encounter with it, the most precise data on this show is perhaps contained in my reactions to individual pieces.
     Guitar (1914) is a Cubist painting but burst into three dimensions, its refraction of representation combatted by its utter poise in placement, its serene symmetry reminiscent of great paintings such as the 1932 painting Girl Before a Mirror or even, for all its dynamic tension, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907. The use of a musical instrument as subject is emblematic of the artist’s life in Montmartre, suggesting art, beauty, leisure, cafes, and dance. Rendered in sheet metal and wire, as much assemblage as sculpture, its position hanging on the wall makes it seem partly a canvas while its shadows in the clear gallery lighting insist on its volume, thrust, and harmonic balance. The artist has established a firm beachhead on the margins of genre itself.
     The painted bronze absinthe glasses of 1914 (with ready-made tin spoons), on the other hand, are a tour de force of anti-art, constructed in defiance of tidy art school design prettiness. The “glass” itself with its Cubist multiplication of surfaces has become clunky and crude, quite unlike those made of glass. They are painted with simple designs that might have come from the most archaic pottery. Yet their impression as one views each of the six in turn accumulates to mutate becoming complex, playful, and dynamic. The viewer recalls the same object surrounded by other artifacts of cafe life in the 1911 painting Glass of Absinthe.
     Woman in the Garden( 1929-30), one of the rejected designs the artist submitted for Apollinaire’s gravesite, is likewise elegant and lyrical. The inherently weighty iron looks as though it is blowing in the wind and might take off at any moment. Open space is an element at least as important as metal here, and many of the iron portions are so thin as to approach the character of lines. Picasso again displays wit and discernment in his use of found objects and includes rounded forms in the shape of philodendron leaves to soften the otherwise prickly texture of a piece that, in its total impact, is suggestive of the poet’s energetic imagination or of a soul in flight.
     The Bull (1958) is breathtaking: at once monumental in the husky torso and large head yet lyrical as any line drawing in the curves of leg and horn. And in the middle of the elegance every bit as demanding as a Matisse design, a pair of witty complications compete for attention: the infantile three dots for a face gazing at the viewer from archaic times and childhood and a tree branch, seemingly casual but in fact the axis of the composition. Here one sees art brut and objets trouvés as no mere theoretical assertions but as tools in the artist’s inventory of possibilities, intentionally employed to produce a calculated effect that maximizes allusive associations ranging from Neolithic bullheads through the Minotaur to Catalan bullfighting and the rich possibilities offered by parallels in the artist’s earlier and later work, including other pieces in the same exhibit: the bull’s head made of a bicycle handlebars and seat and a ceramic bull seemingly from the dawn of time with beautifully swelling forms and topped with schematic designs.
     I appreciate the Head of a Warrior (1933) with its look of goofy eternal outrage, its tennis balls for eyes and off-kilter Trojan helmet, but the plaster heads of Marie-Thérèse seem to me less eloquent. The deformation in the 1931-2 Head of a Woman plasters strike me as evasive or perhaps just wandering. In my eyes the one The Museum of Modern Art owns is the best of the lot, its evocation of antiquity freshened and flavored by Cubism and Surrealism. On the whole, though, I prefer the classically balanced painting of the same model from 1932-4 (and the canvases featuring her from later in the decade). (I may have simply overdosed at the four “Heads,” a “Bust,” and a dozen other representations of the woman in one room together, reminding me that a single visit to a show so grand may be misleading.)
     The show offers many other pleasures and revelations. A collection of casually collected and painted pebbles and pottery shards situates the viewer at the beginning and end of time, recalling the pleasure and mystic significance with which children can endow any objects through artistic manipulation. In a sly reference to the paintings by Renoir, Seurat, Cézanne, Gaugin and others, generally so pretty, Picasso’s The Bathers (1956) is instead an installation of lumber yard scraps looking sufficiently outsider to put me in mind of the temporary pieces people used to erect on the Oakland approach to the Bay Bridge. Even familiar works take on new significance in this rich context. The museum’s own 1950 She-Goat (which I have been at pains to call on every time I visit) is a veritable fertility deity with its swollen body (formed on a wicker basket) and udders (two ceramic jugs).
     The reviewers have pulled out all the stops in their praise of the show: “staggering,” “dumbfounding,” “magnificent,” “a work of art in its own right,” and I need add no superlatives. In the broadest sense, Picasso’s Sculpture reminds every viewer what art is about, and every admirer of Picasso what is peculiarly his in twentieth century art. For one viewer at least, it was also a reminder of a time when the avant-garde’s power to shock, to challenge, and to surprise was fructifying and productive of new meaning and unsuspected beauty. Now, as techniques more radical than Picasso’s have become altogether mainstream in universities, galleries, and museums, when artists receive foundation grants to execute pieces using the fossilized remnants of avant-garde technique, the aesthetic payoff has become piddling indeed. Picasso in the end reminds us of the potential strength of art in a way that cannot be denied by a viewer with open eyes.