This is probably my favorite painting from the book. Ask me again next week, and it will be something different, but for me this painting is so evocative of my childhood when I was first encountering monsters in books, movies, and art.
”When people look at my work, they often imagine that the angst that inspires it comes from my personal life. While I have my own set of neurosis and anxieties, I’m a generally optimistic person.
Paradoxically, it is also true to say, I am my work. However, much of the suffering that finds its way into my paintings comes by way of proxy. The alienation and longing that everyone is schlepping around is palpable to me. I see it in their eyes and hear it in their voices. My search to find the beautiful and poetic in this terrifying world is my own form of punk rebellion.” From the introduction of Chronicles of Fear
Okay, so now I have Green Day lyrics dancing around in my head. (What is punk anymore though? The other day I heard The Clash as muzak and thought Joe Strummer must be rolling around in his grave.) There are certainly punk elements to Nathalie Tierce’s artwork. Punk represents the angry, the disenfranchised, the resistance against being Borged into “normal” society. We may want to belong, but what do we do about this third eye by our nose or our fish lips or our potato head. Norms will smell the “different” on someone no matter what perfume they exude or what clothes they wear. Our very own thoughts and observations will always betray us, and if we resist speaking them, our silence will equally condemn us as…weird.
I first saw this painting when Tierce posted it to her FB account, and I was so struck by it that several days later I searched for it so I could ponder it again. I love the expression on his face and the red color palette.
When Tierce talks about seeing it and hearing it in the voices of others, she is talking about empathy. It seems to be in short supply these days. If we allow ourselves to be emphatic, then we might become emotionally involved in someone else’s pain. We don’t think we can spare the energy. After all, most of us are redlined with our own problems; some of them are first world anxieties, but for many of us, we are dealing with real issues. It just seems to me that we are creating a world we don’t want to live in. Social media is cratering us, politics is tearing us apart, and there is too much of a focus by the media and the fringes of political parties on our differences rather than the ninety-nine percent we have in common. We need to relax, take a breath, see people, even the weird ones, as people again.
I live in Kansas, and windstorms and tornadoes have been a part of my life since I was a spud. The Wizard of Oz was a perennial experience for me and not just on the telly. I can remember more than once being home alone when a terrible storm would sweep in off the plains. I would grab the dog (Spot) and all the pillows I could find, and we would wedge ourselves into the stairway. This painting is what I imagined the world to look like while I was hiding fearfully in the stairwell, hoping the structure of my home wasn’t about to engulf me or send me spinning away to Oz.
The thing I find most inspiring about Tierce’s art is that she sees beyond what we expect to see. By doing so, she forces us to pay attention. We have to weigh her art. We have to relax our minds, ponder the details, and enjoy the clever nuances she incorporates into all of her paintings.
The creatures and humans in her work all seem to ask, What do you see when you look at me? You may see your boss or a family member or an enemy in the eyes of her creations, and you may laugh or you might feel a shiver of uneasy recognition. Great art is supposed to evoke an emotional response, and I can’t imagine anyone who gazes upon Teirce’s work not feeling something disconcerting percolating across their nerve endings.
I would suggest that if you haven’t discovered Tierce before that you pick up all three of her modestly priced books. They make for a fine trilogy, and anytime you are feeling a bit blue or marginalized, there is no better antidote than to spend some time in the alternative universe of Tierce.
I want to thank Nathalie Tierce for sending me an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review....more
”It could be a late work, perhaps as late as 1570, when Titian was well into his eighties. There was a hurried, sketchy quality to some of the figures”It could be a late work, perhaps as late as 1570, when Titian was well into his eighties. There was a hurried, sketchy quality to some of the figures. It was reminiscent of The Death of Actaeon, but the stormy sky may have been finished by one of his workshop students, perhaps Polidoro da Lanciano, although she doubted Polidoro would have completed any of the late works. Titian hadn’t finished putting on the varnish, but in his final years he often left the varnish off parts of his paintings.
Alternatively, it could be a study for an early work, a mere sketch, something intended for Philip II, who liked both religious paintings and detailed nudes posing as naiads or some other mythological women who cavort about naked.
There was no signature.
Without the right equipment, it was hard for her to tell whether it was a Titian or a good forgery.”
I’ve read enough about the art world to know there are fakes hanging in the finest museums. There have been forgers throughout history who were better painters than their more famous counterparts whose art brings millions of dollars at auction. Telling a fake from the real thing? Well, experts can disagree, and it is ultimately up to the wealthy collectors or museum curators to decide if they believe the painting in question to be real. With the millions of dollars trading hands for paintings, you would think that whether a painting is real would be of the utmost importance, but really, to see a return on the investment, an owner only has to convince another buyer to believe that it is real, and a buyer only has to find an “expert” to confirm that it is real.
So this is the world that Helena Marsh works in. The wealthy, octogenarian Geza Marton has hired her to buy a Titian painting in Budapest that left the family’s possession during the war. The migration of art during World War II is a fascinating one, with many paintings still residing in the hands of the wrong owners. The Nazis and the Russians carted off as much European art as they could lay their hands on. Provenance is a term that plays a prominent role in the art world.
Marton isn’t contesting ownership; money is no object, and he wants to buy it back.
He doesn’t even care if it is real.
This should be a very straight forward transaction. After all, the owners want to sell, but soon Helena learns that there are multiple bidders for the painting, and some of them are willing to do anything to get what they want. As she tries to unravel the past so she can understand the present, she learns that Marton’s history is putting some very dangerous men in her path. As if she doesn’t have enough problems, she also has an ex-detective hot on her tail who is trying to understand what exactly she’s doing in Budapest.
Helena has a Bondesque skill set, with the ability to handle herself when situations get rough, and as people become more desperate, she has opportunities to showcase those skills. To keep herself safe and be able to move around the country freely, she assumes multiple identities as she investigates the nuances of this convoluted job. It is hard to hide the way we walk, and this observation by the detective is interesting: ”Close up, she seemed older than yesterday and older than the photo in his breast pocket. But the blond hair, the slim hips, the confident way she carried herself all added up to fortyish and foreign. Women in Hungary hadn’t walked like that for years, not since the economy tanked.” What I really like about that description is that it shows that Budapest is not just a setting for the author Anna Porter. She was born there, and that is an observation that can only come from someone who is intimately familiar with the inhabitants of the city.
I traveled to Budapest a few years ago, and as Porter moved me about the city, I kept having flashbacks to my time there. It is a city with a vibe, and Porter does an excellent job of putting the reader right in the middle of the geography.
This is not your typical thriller that relies only on a plot twist or a series of twists to keep the reader enthralled. You’ll be tasting the gulyás and the Halászlé and washing your hearty meal down with a bottle of Egri Bikavér. You’ll walk across the Széchenyi Chain Bridge and maybe have a moment of reflection while watching the rustling movement of the Danube. You’ll be looking over your shoulder for suspicious characters as you walk down Váci Street. You’ll be contemplating the hunched form of that snooping ex-detective as you sip your coffee at the Madal Cafe. You might even duck in the bathroom and emerge a different person.
Ahh yes...Budapest.
I also have a copy of the second Helena Marsh adventure titled Deceptions, and I can’t wait to see where Anna Porter takes me next.
ECW Press provided a copy to me in exchange for an honest review.
”Philip extended his hand. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘My name is Philip Oliver, and I believe I murdered my wife.’
‘Everybody thinks about the death of their s”Philip extended his hand. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘My name is Philip Oliver, and I believe I murdered my wife.’
‘Everybody thinks about the death of their spouse; everybody fantasizes a nice clean escape from the trap. There’s a tricky thing about marriage, though. Once you’re in it, you never really get out.’
‘But the things I wish for come true,’ Philip said.”
Philip and Amanda Oliver are a power couple, glamorous, beautiful, rich, and suave. They are the type of people that everyone invites to their dinner parties and people wiggle up to the dynamic couple in the hopes that some of that special sparkle will rub off on them. There is this special synergy created when two extravagantly attractive people pair up. They become larger than their component parts, and once one drifts from the other, neither ever regains that mystical, awe-inspiring glow. A blurb on the back of the book says, ”The Great Gatsby meets Raymond Chandler.” Well, this isn’t Gatsby; this is actually Tender Is the Night. Philip and Amanda are Nick and Nicole Diver, and the Rosemary Hoyt of this story is a bodacious, Italian artist named Claudia Silva.
Philip and Jackson Wyeth, art dealer, are really good friends, and when Philip sees Claudia’s picture in a magazine, he calls up Jackson for some intel on her.
’’’What’s the scoop--is her art as good as her ass?’
‘You won’t know what to grab first.’”
We never know what conversations will prove to be important.
If we want to tie in The Great Gatsby, Jackson Wyeth is the character that has the role of Nick Carraway. It seems like Jackson is a part of the inner circle, but he is always the third wheel, and at the end of the evening, the glamour pair always leave him on the other side of the bedroom door.
It is shocking when Philip leaves Amanda for Claudia. All their friends are shocked. This isn’t supposed to happen. They were the ideal, and if the ideal can’t make it work, how are the rest of us supposed to make it work? To further complicate things Philip is suffering from a syndrome that is slowly eroding his brilliant mind. Was his disease fueling his lack of Claudia inhibitions, or is this just old-fashioned lust? Maybe it is a midlife crisis, and he wants to roll the cosmic dice to feel young once again?
Amanda doesn’t stay home to cry and brood. She takes up with a young, handsome artist named Paul Morse.
Infidelity is as common in the art community as a tube of titanium white. Even Jackson, when he was married, was a serial adulterer, and so was his French wife. Stepping out on a marriage is one thing, but actually leaving the wife for the mistress in the 1990s was still a bit shocking. Philip is too rich to care. Philip’s ex-wife Angela, before Amanda, sort of sums up their sins succinctly: ”We’ve all screwed ourselves and each other. We deserve whatever we get.”
So Amanda is shot through the back of the head in their deluxe apartment in the sky, and Philip’s compromised brain isn’t sure whether he murdered her or not, but the still working, analytical part of his brain thinks he must have. Jackson and his cop friend Ed Hogan team up to try and determine who had the motive to kill her besides her husband, Philip.
In the course of their investigation, Jackson discovers that there is a pedaphile ring circling around Melissa, the beautiful, precocious twelve year old daughter of Philip and Angela. He sets up a sting to take them down. I kept thinking, as Jackson becomes immersed in the underworld of child pornography, that he is doing something I just couldn’t do. It takes real courage to expose yourself to such filth, but the question becomes, as Melissa toys with him, has he triggered something in himself that he didn’t even know he desired?
If F. Scott Fitzgerald had decided to write a hardboiled crime novel, he might very well have written a plot very similar to the one written by Richard Vine. ”There’s a fine art to murder” after all. Vine is the managing editor of the magazine Art in America, and his background in art adds clever nuances that give the book an extra edge of authenticity.
The lies are as tangled as Sparky Griswald’s Christmas lights, and as the truth begins to untangle some of those lies, new lies crop up until even the truth is too untrustworthy to believe. The truth sometimes is just the version of the truth we choose to believe.
”The villa on the Riviera had been an anonymous gift to the artist, and he had accepted it in the spirit in which it was offered. No strings attached.”The villa on the Riviera had been an anonymous gift to the artist, and he had accepted it in the spirit in which it was offered. No strings attached. He wasn’t well-to-do, but the sale of his Montmartre shop would take care of his expenses for several months. The Paris Soir reporter then asked the obvious question. ‘If you refuse to exhibit or to sell your paintings, how will you live?
‘That,’ Debierue replied, ‘isn’t my concern. An artist has too much work to do to worry about such matters.’ With his mistress clinging to his arm, Debierue climbed into a waiting taxi and was off to the railroad station.”
Jacques Debierue is, without a doubt, the most famous painter in the world who has never sold a painting. No one has seen even a scrap of one of his paintings for decades, and yet the endless speculation about what he is creating has kept the art world atwitter. When James Figueras, ambitious art critic, gets a chance to meet him, he is not only determined to take his picture and get an interview, but to also, at all cost, lay eyes on the man’s work.
James decides to take his “girlfriend” with him, a teacher from Duluth who climbed into his bed while on vacation in Florida and...won’t leave. ”Despite her size, and she was a large woman, Berenice, curled and cramped up in sleep, looked vulnerable to the point of fragility. Her unreasonably long blond lashes swept round flushed cheeks, and her childish face, in repose and without makeup, took several years from her age. Her heavy breasts and big round ass, however, exposed now, as the short flimsy nightgown road high above her hips, were incongruously mature in contrast with her innocent face and tangled Alice-in-Wonderland hair.”
Berenice, for all her annoying aspects, is the artist’s bait. Debierue might be less likely to boot the art critic down the road if the art critic brings something lovely for the artist to admire. James is a serious man, and even though he tries to control every aspect of this historic meeting between a famous painter without a known painting to talk about and the desperate-to-be famous art critic, things get seriously out of hand.
There is a revelation.
There is a fire.
There is an art critic, sitting in a hotel room, painting a picture called The Burnt Orange Heresy.
There is an unexpected murder.
Everything that could possibly go wrong in a James Figueras nightmare does so, including things that he couldn’t even conceive of going wrong in his wildest, most sinister dreams.
In other words, this is a Charles Willeford novel.
I first read Willeford’s novels thirty years ago, but I think I actually have a much greater appreciation reading and rereading his books now than I did then. He’ll make your teeth squeak as you grind your molars together to masticate the hardboiled egg of a plot he has dropped on your plate. And what you are spitting out? That ain’t eggshell; that’s grit, road grit. And that pain in your neck is from the hard left turn plot twists that left you half hanging out of the car and two wheels dangling in the air. And that red sauce on your tie? That ain’t sauce...you just got a little too close to the action.
”I thought of Fonny’s touch, of Fonny, in my arms, his breath, his touch, his odor, his weight, that terrible and beautiful presence riding into me an”I thought of Fonny’s touch, of Fonny, in my arms, his breath, his touch, his odor, his weight, that terrible and beautiful presence riding into me and his breath being snarled, as if by a golden thread, deeper and deeper in his throat as he rode--as he rode deeper and deeper not so much into me as into a kingdom which lay just behind his eyes. He worked on wood that way. He worked on stone that way. If I had never seen him work, I might never have known he loved me.
It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.”
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Stephen James and Kiki Layne star in the 2018 film that was released on December 25th.
Fonny and Tish have known each other nearly their entire lives. Sometimes relationships like this evolve into being friends or at least acquaintances for life. Sometimes they become lovers, and when lightning strikes the same place twice, they become lovers and best friends.
Lightning struck twice.
This is a tale of two families. Tish’s family is not only supportive of the relationship but go so far as to consider Fonny part of their family. As Tish and Fonny are caught up in the whirlwind of 1970s racist New York, the support of Tish’s family is the only thing standing between Fonny spending a good part of his life in jail and Tish having to work the streets to make enough money to afford a lawyer for his defense.
Fonny’s family is a different story. His mother has never thought highly of him or his prospects. She is a religious nut who, in her fervor for her God, has lifted herself up above the rest of humanity. From this perch, she can cast judgments down on those around her, especially those not heeding the call of the church. She would be a better Christian if she were casting bread instead of casting aspersions. Fonny’s two older sisters, taking their cues from their mother, are dismissive of their little brother as well and find it embarrassing, rather than tragic, that he has been arrested. They are sure he is guilty because they have found him guilty his whole life.
Fonny’s father is an interesting character. He is a man who loves his family, but he knows that Fonny needs his love more than the rest. Tish’s father, Joseph, is always bucking Frank up, giving him hope.
”’Look. I know what you’re saying. You’re saying they got us by the balls. Okay. But that’s our flesh and blood, baby: our flesh and blood. I don’t know how we going to do it. I just know we have to do it. I know you ain’t scared for you., and God knows I ain’t scared for me. That boy is got to come out of there. That’s all. And we got to get him out. That’s all. And the first thing we got to do, man, is just not to lose our nerve. We can’t let those cunt-faced, white-assed motherfuckers get away with this shit any longer.’ He subsides, he sips his beer. ‘They been killing our children long enough.’”
James Baldwin was proclaiming that #blacklivesmatter from the beginning of his existence as a writer.
Being a young, virile, prideful, black man in the 1970s was a dangerous thing to be. Fonny, by breathing the same air and walking the same streets as the predominantly white police force, has committed a crime. Yes, he has committed a crime by existing. When he comes to the attention of one particular cop, it is only a matter of time before he is put in the frame for something. This cop has an interest in Fonny that is akin to sexual desire. He pursues him like a spurned lover pursues the person of their affection. He is the head of the hammer of white fear.
”He walked the way John Wayne walks, striding out to clean up the universe, and he believed all that shit: a wicked, stupid, infantile motherfucker. Like his heroes, he was kind of a pinheaded, heavy gutted, big assed, and his eyes were as blank as George Washington’s eyes. But I was beginning to learn something about the blankness of eyes. What I was learning was beginning to frighten me to death. If you look steadily into that unblinking blue, into that pinpoint at the center of the eye, you discover a bottomless cruelty, a viciousness cold and icy. In that eye, you do not exist: if you are lucky”
The problem is that Fonny is at the pinpoint of that blue eye.
This is a book about injustice, about family sticking together, about community, and it is about love, real love, soul trembling love. It is the type of love that, when your lover walks in the room, you feel your insides turn to Champagne with frenzied bubbles and a cork in your throat trembling to hold it all in.
One thing I’ve learned about life is those that have the least to give, give the most.
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Two Bards hanging out together. The conversation they would have had over a bottle of wine.
James Baldwin moved to Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France in 1970. This book was published in 1974. Even though he was an American in exile, America came to him. Miles Davis, Josephine Baker, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ray Charles, and many more made pilgrimages to see him. He spent most of his days writing and responding to correspondence from all over the world. He changed lives with his gift of hope and his honesty about what was really happening to Black America. Every time I read one of his books, I am struck by the power of his prose and the passion of his anger. He was determined to drag America, kicking and screaming, under a soul revealing, bright light so the demons of inequality, racism, and hatred have a chance to be exorcised.
”All artists succumb to self-doubt; it is the handmaiden of creation. For a woman, however, whether in Virginia Woolf’s early twentieth-century Englan”All artists succumb to self-doubt; it is the handmaiden of creation. For a woman, however, whether in Virginia Woolf’s early twentieth-century England or Joan Mitchell’s 1950’s New York, that doubt would have been the result of forces both creative and social. Of the latter, Woolf wrote,
’The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What’s the good of your writing?’
Many decades later, Joan would put her own salty spin on the same sentiment.
’How did I feel, like how? I felt, you know, when I was discouraged I wondered if really women couldn’t paint, the way all the men said they couldn’t paint. But then at other times I said, ‘Fuck them’, you know.’
Mary Gabriel has written a biography of five amazingly talented women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler. However, his book is so much more than just the lives of these women. The influence of world events on people, especially creative people, can not be separated from the accomplishments of those who painted, wrote, and composed, who were attempting to make sense of these events with their brushstrokes, words, and music.
Picasso is debatably the most famous and most influential painter of all time. His painting of Guernica is without question one of the most important paintings of all time. He brought painting forward to a different place, and in my mind, the Abstract Expressionist painters spent their lives chasing after Picasso. In the process, they broke every rule, destroyed every boundary, and remade art in their image.
We call a male artist a painter without even thinking about it. We still call female artist ‘women painters.’ By the end of this book, the five women will convince you that women deserve to be called painters without designation of their sex.
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Trojan Gates by Helen Frankenthaler. I love this painting!
Now the men are here, as well. In fact, two of the five women married the two most famous men of the New York Abstract Expressionist movement. Lee Krasner married Jackson Pollock and spent the rest of his life trying to keep the man alive. She always felt like she had a ”comet by the tail.” Pollock blew everything up in the art world, but in the process he destroyed his own life and adversely affected the lives of those who cared about him. Helen Frankenthaler summed up his influence on other painters. ”Soaking it all in, Helen realized something she had not understood when merely viewing Jackson’s work on a gallery wall. Pollock didn’t paint with his hands or wrists or even his arms, he painted with his whole body. Helen saw the potential for her own work in his method. She, too, wanted to engage her entire person in her paintings, not merely the delicate extreminites that held a brush. She did not want to paint on a canvas, she wanted to paint in it.”
Elaine married Willem (Bill) de Kooning, and as much as Lee struggled to find her artistic place with Pollock, Elaine had similar struggles with her relationship with de Kooning. Their marriage was beset with infidelity, artistic jealousy, and poverty. Most of the painters struggled to feed and shelter themselves and frequently had to find jobs that took them away from their canvases. Elaine wrote art reviews for magazines to allow Bill the freedom to keep searching for his voice, his expression in the strokes of his brush. Her writing helped define the Abstract Expressionist movement. ”’Whenever Hollywood does a movie on artists they don’t know how to deal with what drives an artist,’ Elaine said. ‘They always think an artist works toward fame. They can’t imagine the thrill of the actual work, it doesn’t occur to them. That, they feel is just on the side, and fame is the aim. Whereas it’s exactly the opposite. {Work} is the aim, and fame is a byproduct.’”
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Elaine de Kooning went through a period when she was painting men, a reverse of the concept of women as muses. Why can’t men be muses as well? I absolutely love her portraits and would have loved to have seen how she would have painting me.
Gabriel covers the evolution of this art movement from the late 1920s to the early 1960s. Prohibition, the swinging 1930s, the emergence of Jazz, WW2 when the intellectuals of Europe were forced out of their countries to find a home in New York, and McCarthyism all had influence on the minds and actions of the artists. Amongst so much turmoil, is it any wonder that art needed to find new ways to express the torment?
”The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.”
Grace Hartigan was in love with the poet Frank O’Hara, and he with her. ”If a homosexual and a heterosexual could be in love, it was falling in love.” His poems influenced her art, but I felt that her painting may have influenced his poetry even more. Those who chose to love Grace or Frank had to understand that their relationship with the artist or poet was never going to eclipse what Grace and Frank felt for one another. I found their relationship exceedingly intriguing because so much of the definition of a relationship is defined by having sex. They were closer than siblings. Closer than lovers. They were frequently confused by the boundaries of their odd relationship and tempted to consummate it in the normal fashion, but the fear of destroying the precious, fragile bonds of what they had together always kept them from provoking fate.
Jackson Pollock was the first celebrity artist of the movement. Lee Krasner worked tirelessly to promote his art. She wasn’t just doing it for Pollock. She knew that women abstract expressionists had no chance to ever be recognized if the men were not recognized first. She put aside her own art for long periods of time to champion Pollock. Her other, on going concern with the “comet” was keeping him alive. His epic drinking was a constant threat to his health and his legacy. She was successful at least in preserving his legacy, but I can’t help wondering if the cost to her art was too large a price to pay.
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Lee Krasner, Untitled 1948. The more I look into this painting it becomes a maze for my mind.
I read this book every morning with a hot cup of Earl Grey, steaming in my hand. It was such an inspirational way to start the day by reading about the trials and tribulations of these five women as they forged a place for themselves in a profession that deigned to recognize the importance of their work. They persevered because they had no choice. The same fire that drove Pollock and de Kooning to create their masterpieces was an eternal flame in their bellies as well. They painted until the final veil descended.
Mary Gabriel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her book Love and Capital, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she finds herself back on that list with this book. I knew the names of these five women before starting to read this book, but their work was unknown to me. If I have seen their art, it was without truly seeing it. With all these new reference points and now knowing their place in history, I can look upon their art with eyes properly focused to see beyond just color and composition, but with reverence for how that piece of art was created and the battle it took for that artwork to even be hung on the wall of any museum.
This is without a doubt the most influential and enjoyable read of the year for me.
I want to thank Little, Brown, and Company for sending me a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
Mr. Clavius Frederick Earbrass, writer, goes to a literary party.
”The talk deals with disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequateMr. Clavius Frederick Earbrass, writer, goes to a literary party.
”The talk deals with disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews, others’ declining talent, and the unspeakable horror of the literary life.”
This party of dissatisfied writers may be like holding a mirror up to his own face, but it is still a diversion away from the manuscript which hangs around his neck like a soiled napkin.
”Not only is it repulsive to the eye and hand, with its tattered edges, stains, rumpled patches, scratchings-out, and scribblings, but its contents are, by this time, boring to the point of madness.”
Of course, now with our computer screens and the delete button, our manuscripts stay much tidier, though I have heard of writers picking up their computers in a moment of frustration and tossing them out the nearest window. Writing might be an art, but the journey might not always be artful.
There is an impalement on a bottle tree, which the circumstances have me out on my back deck contemplating the dangers of my own blue bottle tree. Maybe I should move it a bit farther away from the house. It wouldn’t be an Edward Gorey book without a mention of a horrendous, unusual death.
I can’t really say more except that I was thoroughly amused. This is the first of many Gorey books I plan to read over the next couple of years. I recently finished reading the new biography of Gorey by Mark Dery called Born to Be Posthumous, which is not only excellent, but has inspired me to read as much Gorey material as I can fit into my reading schedule.
If you are a writer, it will be impossible for you not to identify with the anxieties, insecurities, and frustrations of Clavius Frederick Earbrass.
”Only now are art critics, scholars of children’s literature, historians of book-cover design and commercial illustration, and chroniclers of the gay ”Only now are art critics, scholars of children’s literature, historians of book-cover design and commercial illustration, and chroniclers of the gay experience in postwar America waking up to the fact that Gorey is a critically neglected genius. His consummately original vision--expressed in virtuosic illustrations and poetic texts but articulated with equal verve in book-jacket design, verse plays, puppet shows, and costumes and sets for ballets and Broadway productions--has earned him a place in the history of American art and letters.”
I first experienced Edward Gorey without even knowing I was in his world. The introduction to PBS’s long running series MYSTERY! was where I first brushed up against the uniqueness of Gorey’s imagination. I was in 8th grade. I can remember sitting there completely taken aback, unsure of what I’d just seen, but I knew I’d never seen anything like it before. Every week I watched the opening very carefully looking for anything that I missed the week before. It never occured to me to find out who the creator was of this wonderful opening or pursue other work by him. I wasn’t a fully developed researcher and collector of those things that pleased me...yet.
So when Little, Brown contacted me to see if I was interested in reviewing a biography of Edward Gorey, I felt a whole host of emotions. A) Even though I had occasionally browsed his books, I had never really allowed myself to be seduced by his work. B) I’d been in a Victorian phase for many years now and still had never delved into the carefully cross-hatched Victorian figures that Gorey created. C) This book could be the impetus to encourage me to finally launch a full out investigation of all things Gorey. D) I was thrilled with the opportunity to maybe finally close a circle begun when I was 13 years old.
Gorey was all that I hoped he would be. He was a voracious reader. He took a book with him everywhere so that any time he found himself waiting in line or stuck in a boring situation he could pull out his book and take himself elsewhere. He had over 21,000 books in his library at his death. He watched over 1,000 movies a year. Think that is impossible? Not if you don’t sleep. He was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, cats, and, most of all, Balanchine's ballet performances. To list all the things he enjoyed would maybe be contained in a scroll ten feet long if one wrote them in small, spidery script.
Gorey considered himself asexual. ”Thomas Garvey coins the useful term glass closet to describe ’that strange cultural zone’ inhabited by people in the public eye who ‘simultaneously operate as both gay and straight. Gorey kept perfectly mum about his true nature to the press; he only spoke about it in his art.’” I think that Gorey did not want to be pigeonholed as anything really. He was fussy about just being considered an artist when he really saw himself as a writer first. He was flamboyant in his appearance with wearing floor length fur coats year round and sporting rings on every finger. Supposedly, there was a lot of gay coding into his artwork for book covers that he designed for writers such as Herman Melville for Anchor Books. Looking at any form of art with an eye for overt or hidden symbols always makes me a bit nervous. Sometimes you find what you are looking for because that is what you want to find.
That all said, every crush that Gorey had throughout his life was some form of unrequited love for a member of the same sex. I wonder when we will reach a time when we are not categorized by our sexual preferences. Gay musicians/artists/politicians, etc. are still pressured by interest groups to declare their sexual preference, but by doing so they are generally suddenly defined first by their sexual preference, and everything else they do almost becomes a footnote to that revelation.
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The melancholy deaths of Gorey’s children.
His books were dominated by infanticides. They caused parents to be uneasy and made it hard for booksellers to categorize his work. The awkward size of his books was also difficult and forced many publisher’s to design counter displays for his books at the register. Kids, in general, I have found, love his books. The creative deaths of the children in his books could be scary, but we do like to be frightened, especially when Gorey leads us onward to an ending that leaves us smiling.
He didn’t mind confusing us either. ”N is for Neville who died of ennui.” Or how about this one: ”Still later Gerald did a terrible thing to Elsie with a saucepan.” What terrible thing could anyone do to another person with a saucepan? The mind of the reader was forced to ponder and ponder some more. Usually, I ended up laughing at the scattershot directions that my mind went, trying to pluck the right thread that would lead me to where Gorey intended me to go. Or maybe he wanted the readers to lead himself to his own meaning.
One of my favorite stories of his was ”The Unstrung Harp”, which was about a writer named (C)lavius (F)rederick Earbrass. ”’The best novel ever written about a novelist,’ Graham Greene called it in all apparent seriousness.” The book covered all the hazards of a writer’s life: ”disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews, terrors of the deadline and the blank page.”
The idea to have Gorey design the sets for the Broadway production of Dracula was simply a moment of brilliance. He threw himself completely into the project with “every leather-bound volume lovingly rendered of the books in Dr. Deward’s sanatorium library”. The bats, skeletons, death’s-head pansies, coffins, mummified corpses, Dracula’s watch chain strung with teeth, the drapes, and the exquisite wallpaper were all drawn with delicate care. This showed the world that Gorey was much more than just a cartoonist or “children’s” book author or really categorized any which way except that he was capable of showing exceptional talent in whatever medium he chose to express it. The show ran for 925 performances over three years and made Gorey a wealthy man.
I was constantly, gleefully googling arcane references while reading this book. Gorey’s interests were wide and varied. By reading about his interests, I expanded my own passions, and really anyone who cares about the creative process should read this book. He was a Renaissance man, not only in talent but also in the way he found the world so fascinating. People might have been disappointing, but then he could always create more acceptable characters with the nib of pen. I will certainly be pursuing many more lines of inquiry inspired by this book. Mark Dery will take you on a journey into the development of a creative mind and introduce you to a man who figured out a way to live his life the way he wanted to. So few of us get that opportunity.
My thanks to Little, Brown who supplied me with a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
”How amazing my mother and father were! All those years, all their bullying doubts, all in the paltry hope that strangers might someday stand before t”How amazing my mother and father were! All those years, all their bullying doubts, all in the paltry hope that strangers might someday stand before their work and look, probably no longer than a few seconds. That’s all they were fighting for.
What driven lives!”
Charles “Pinch” Bavinsky is the Roman spawn of a Canadian sculptor and a celebrated American artist. Bear Bavinsky achieved his reputation in the 1950s by painting body parts, never faces. His canvases are masculine and virile to match his Hemingwayesque personality. He is a charmer. Woman become weak in the knees around him, gallery owners froth at the mouth, collectors beg to be allowed to buy his art, and even those who meet him that don’t know who he is find themselves seduced by his magnetic, larger than life personality.
Can you imagine being his son?
Pinch worships his father and spends a lifetime trying to get his attention. Bear is rather indifferent to his offspring, almost calloused, but when he does share the warmth of his attention with one of them, it is like they have inhaled a drug they can’t get enough of. So his kids end up loathing him and loving him in wildly changing measures. Bear likes his kids more when they are small and cute. By the time they get older, he doesn’t have to deal with them because he has already moved on to the next woman. Sometimes the next woman overlaps with the current woman. Bear is a self-indulgent, egotistical, domineering nightmare to be involved with, but every one of his past conquests would drop everything to be with him again.
Did I mention he has seventeen kids?
Out of all of his wives, girlfriends, flings, we get to know Pinch’s mother Natalie the best, the woman who inspired some of his best paintings. As any woman would be, she is overwhelmed by him. Her attempt at an artist’s career is floundering and drowning in the wake of his successes. As Pinch gets older, he becomes more reflective about his mother, less embarrassed by her, and more understanding of the sacrifices she made to her own aspirations to be Bear’s muse and to raise a child by herself. ”None of her works will sit in a museum, he knows. Natalie, toiling through the night, or building slow pieces at her solicary workshop, or looking at him from her potter’s wheel in Rome---she was disregarded, and will remain so forever, among the billions whose inner lives clamor, then expire, never to earn the slightest notice.
It is not enough to be good. The world churns on personalities. By Bear being a larger than life figure, how good was his art? Are even the critics capable of evaluating him properly if they are caught like moth in the glow of his flame? Bear is hyper critical of his own art, and few of his pieces ever survive from a blank canvas to a finished painting. He keeps a barrel in the back alley that he can burn the paintings that are deemed imperfect.
So we follow Pinch through his trials of trying to become a painter only to see him slapped down by a single damning sentence from his father. The Bear God has spoken so there is no point in continuing. Pinch becomes an academic, intent on becoming known well enough to write his father’s biography in yet another attempt to prove himself worthy of his father’s respect.
Sometimes we give away lifetimes trying to impress the wrong person.
Pinch meets a few women in the course of his life, but he is not very successful with any of them. His marriage to Julie is a disaster. ”She must be around his age, perhaps a tad older, with caramel-brown curls framing confectionary eyes, a wide strong frame, soft without being curvaceous. Julie M. is not beautiful. He experiences a rush of need for her.” This reminds me of Marcel Proust’s great quote: ”Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.” I applaud Pinch for finding Julie attractive for not being beautiful. I personally find women who are perfectly beautiful rather unappealing. There is something unreal about them. I’d rather see a woman with a gap between her teeth or with features slightly out of balance or, better yet, to be attractive because she is passionate about something or wickedly intelligent.
My only concern is that, after reading about the descriptions of the legions of women that Bear found attractive, I feel this sinking suspicion that Pinch’s interest in Julie is based more on his father’s ideal of a mate than his own.
The plot moves us from Italy to the United States, mixed with several desperate trips by Pinch to his father’s estate in France to try and insure his father’s legacy continues to grow. The lengths that Pinch is willing to go are really beyond the pale.
The payoff for me in this novel is that Pinch does finally assert himself in a BRAVO! hand clapping style that had me grinning to myself. There are all kinds of ways to win, and Pinch finds a sneaky way to become almost as famous as his father.
It is a secret.
I enjoyed Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists so it was no surprise to find myself absorbed in this new cast of characters. Of course, Bear takes center stage even when he isn’t on stage, but the supporting characters to his largeness, like Natalie and Pinch, are much more real than he could ever be. It is so hard to have a good life or the right life. By the time we have figured out what we’ve done or not done, twenty years, forty years have passed, and we are looking in a mirror at a stranger. The fire in the belly has dampened and regret can be a shroud that covers us til we expire. Pinch may have given up too many years standing in the shadow of his father and chasing a vision of himself shaped by his obsession with his father, but I do hope in the end he understood that his life, though far removed from his expectations, was still a good life.
”For the four years I’ve lived in Los Angeles, the Rocque Museum has been my workplace and my university, offering me a degree in contemporary art and”For the four years I’ve lived in Los Angeles, the Rocque Museum has been my workplace and my university, offering me a degree in contemporary art and the cosmopolitan life---brilliant as the blues in a Sam Francis painting, decadent as a twenty-four-karat cast of a cat testicle. Most days pass in a pleasurable blur of words and pictures. Most nights I hate to leave my little office, especially on April evenings like this, when I can look over my mess of proofs, out to the greening city, and imagine I am still happy.”
Unfortunately, we can rarely appreciate how happy we are until the moment has passed.
For Maggie Richter, Los Angeles offers an opportunity to find a career where she can work with intelligent, creative, and passionate people who care about the same things she does. Any relationship with L.A. would be listed on Facebook as complicated, what with its convoluted history involving more crushed dreams than realized aspirations. It is a place where glimmering fantasies are merely shimmering shapes that never fully materialize, and luck is as necessary as talent. Maggie knows that, with a city like L.A., there is give and take, but right now she feels she may have given too much.
”What happened between us still mystifies me: how two lovers can move to a city, and the city itself wraps around them like vines, pulling them apart, pushing them toward others, until they become so entwined in their separate lives that they can no longer recognize what they once felt, or even who they once were.”
Greg SHAW Ferguson, or I guess I should just call him SHAW since he is trying to morph himself into the Prince or the Sting or the Moby of the art gallery world, drops Maggie like a bag full of fire ants and scatters her emotions in all directions. Soul mated for life? Well, at least until he meets Kim Lord.
Kim Lord has a reputation for producing edgy, progressive art, but she has been out of circulation for a while, so this new exhibition, Still Lives, that she does in conjunction with the Rocque Museum, is not only going to reestablish her reputation, but also give the Rocque some much needed publicity, as well.
Maggie needs to meet someone new.
Work is still a great way to meet potential mates because of the ridiculous amount of time we spend with people we toil with, but for Maggie, the percentages are not so good at the museum. ”Of the less than fifty percent of museum employees that are men, half are gay and a quarter are married. The other quarter tend to date cocktail straws.” Ok, I laughed out loud at cocktail straws. I’ve met a few of those California cocktail straws who seem to exist on celery, coffee, and cigarettes.
The other problem that can not be denied is that Maggie is still hung up on Greg, pardon me, SHAW. She is suffering as a swan, a penguin, or a gray wolf, all creatures who scientists tell us mate for life. The problem is Greg seems to be a bunny, a ground squirrel, or maybe a flighty chickadee.
She can’t just move on, even though she knows she should. She has some caring friends who encourage her to jump back on the horse (Maggie does have a horse incident believe it or not), and she begins the endless setup dates of friends of friends that are bandaids on a situation that really needs a tourniquet.
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Model Judy Ann Dull was murdered by Harvey Glatman in 1957. Glatman took several pictures of his victims tied up in numerous poses.
And then there is Kim Lord’s face everywhere, even in the art for the show. The exhibit is highlighting women who have been brutally murdered, such as Elizabeth Short, famously known as The Black Dahlia, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Judy Ann Dull. In Lord’s art, it isn’t Elizabeth, Nicole, and Judy, but Kim Lord herself who is posing in the place of the original victim.
Can you imagine being constantly reminded of your rival everywhere you turn? Rival might be the wrong word, for how can one compete with the explosive vivacity and intensity of a force of nature like Kim Lord?
Then Lord has the audacity to go missing.
Suspect #1 Greg SHAW Ferguson. That middle name comes in handy now because serial killers, terrorists, and murderers are usually identified with all three names in the newspaper. Not much farther down the list of suspects would probably appear the name Maggie Richter. No middle name necessary at this point.
It might not be the best decision for a museum copy editor to become a gumshoe, but she is driven by a need to find out what happened to Lord, free Greg, and in the process hopefully find herself again.
These art museum people who populate this novel are culturally tuned in and have many similarities to the bookstore people I used to hang out with. They are clever, jaded, cruel, caring, driven, spontaneous, but capable of still believe the world can be made a better place. They don’t want a job. They want a calling. These are my kind of people.
Maria Hummel has a light touch. She is observant and descriptive in clever ways, with word choices that bring a smile to my lips. She makes me want Maggie to do more than just solve a mystery. I wanted her to go beyond just imagining being happy. I wanted her to find a way to BE happy.
I want to thank Megan Fishmann and Counterpoint Press for supplying me with a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
”He talked constantly about hands. He always judged people he saw for the first time by their hands.
‘Did you see that fellow, the way he tore open the”He talked constantly about hands. He always judged people he saw for the first time by their hands.
‘Did you see that fellow, the way he tore open the package of cigarettes? He’s a scoundrel. And that woman--did you notice the way she brushed back her hair with her forefinger?...A good girl.’ Sometimes he labeled them--’stupid hands,’ ‘witty hands,’ ‘ordinary hands,’ ‘whore’s hands’...”
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was an undisputable genius. He may not be my favorite painter, though I do love much of his work, but he might be the painter I respect the most. His character and his work ethic are so impressive.
It’s interesting thinking about Renoir judging people by their hands. I wonder how accurate he was with his assessments. If he saw my hands, what would he believe about me? Many people have told me I should have been a pianist with my long, slender fingers. I don’t see him falling for that trap. My palms along the knuckles have a few calloused ridges from gardening, but not like the bulging hills of my youth. He certainly wouldn’t be fooled into thinking I’m a manual laborer. I have scars. A ridge of scar tissue on the back of my thumb might tell him something. I was sliding a scoop shovel into a bracket holder on a grain truck and held onto it too long. A steel flange peeled the back of my thumb like a grape. There are other interesting scars scattered along my fingers, thin white lines that reveal little of the trauma that created them. He liked hands that could do things. Who would Renoir think I am?
Another interesting aspect of Renoir’s obsession with hands is the crippling arthritis that deformed his hands later in his life. Many artists would retire, but not Renoir. He continued to paint every day and with a precision that is marvelous to contemplate. His deft touch with a brush required a magnifying glass to see how precise his brush was, despite the state of his hands. What would Renoir make of his own hands if they belonged to someone else? Would he guess a painter? His eyes were so sharp that, though he may talk about the hands, I have a feeling, in Sherlock Holmes fashion, he weighed all the other clues available to him as well.
He scoffed at the idea that he was a genius, though it is frankly indisputable. His son Jean, who wrote this marvelous memoir, once screamed in frustration…”Enough of Genius.” It would be difficult venturing forth to find your own creative outlet when the person you know the best in the world is one of the best at what he does. Jean became a filmmaker; fortunately, he did not find his talent with a brush, but then with genius as the bar, who would have the cojones to even begin?
This book is mostly set during the later years of Renoir’s life. Jean was badly wounded in the war. There is this poignant scene described in the book when his mother came to the field hospital to see him. He was in a bad way, and the doctors wanted to take his leg. She refused to allow this but nursed him herself until he was out of danger. She saved his life as good mothers do who save their offsprings’ lives many times over their lifetimes without fanfare. While convolescenting, Jean decided it was time to really start to listen to the stories of his aging father. The result was this book.
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Andree played by the lovely Christa Theret in Renoir. The woman who seduced two Renoirs.
I had been wanting to read this book for a while, but what finally spurred me to pick it up this year was watching the 2013 movie Renoir, directed by Gilles Burdos, that was based on this memoir. The effervescent Andree became one of Renoir’s last models. Her luminescent skin soaked up the sun and reflected it. She later married Jean and became the actress Catherine Hessling. She is remembered for the films she made, but she was immortalized by the paintings she inspired.
I was also surprised by how much I liked the writing style of the book. For most of it, I felt like I was sitting on a bench with Jean, sipping wine, as he told me stories about his father and his encounters with life. I would laugh as Jean related how weird it was for him to go to boarding school and see how obsessed other boys were with seeing smutty pictures. He grew up surrounded by beautiful, naked women and didn’t really see what the big deal was. The women with whom Renoir encompassed himself were not only there to make his life easier but were also the inspiration for his art. ”He marries all the women he paints--but with his brush.” They also had a huge impact on Jean as extensions of his mother.
I mentioned Renoir’s work ethic. He painted every day, even when he was in poor health or racked by pain. He loved his chosen profession. He saw himself as a blue collar worker rather than an artist. He had no pretensions about his talent. He respected it by continually using it. He always wanted to improve. He painted on the last day of his life. ”He asked for his paintbox and brushes, and he painted the anemones which Nenette, our kind-hearted maid, had gone out and gathered for him. For several hours he identified himself with these flowers, and forgot his pain. Then he motioned for someone to take his brush and said, ‘I think I am beginning to understand something about it.’ That was the phrase Grand Louise repeated to me. The nurse thought he said, ‘Today I learned something.’”
He used his eyes and his brushes to continually search for truths about the world around him, and through his art, he attempted to share his findings with the rest of us.
”One does not marry art. One ravishes it.” ---Edgar Degas
Dee Sleign is hanging out in small cafes, exploring fussy, tucked away museums, and doink
”One does not marry art. One ravishes it.” ---Edgar Degas
Dee Sleign is hanging out in small cafes, exploring fussy, tucked away museums, and doinking, like she invented sex, an older, richer boyfriend.
She is having the Paris experience.
She isn’t sure what she should do with the rest of her life, but she gets this idea of exploring the influence that drugs had on Impressionist art for a thesis. Dee is told about an old man who knew the Impressionist painters when they were still alive. He is living in near poverty, but he has masterpieces worth tens of thousands of dollars in the 1970s; in today’s money, those paintings would be worth millions.
There is something admirable about a guy who values the art even more than the money they are worth. (A point that is a theme for Ken Follett in this book.)
This man, poor in money but rich in culture, tells Dee about a Modigliani that was painted under the influence of drugs and taken back to Italy by a priest.
A lost Modigliani.
Dee is so excited about the prospect of finding a lost masterpiece that she needs to tell someone. But who? Who does she know who would understand how exciting this potential discovery is? Uncle Charles Lampeth, of course. The man for whom art is a commodity to be traded, sold, or stolen as if it were corn, wheat, or barley. She sends him a postcard and touches off a cavalcade of an Amazing Race version of who can find the painting first.
He wouldn’t do that to his niece would he? Whatever ethics he had been born with have long been extinguished from his brain as a guiding principle.
In the other part of the story Julian Black is smarting from a lack of funds. He is enraged by the lack of respect from his cuckolding, upper-class wife. He is also the owner of an art gallery on life support. Needless to say, Mr. Black is a very desperate man, indeed. When he learns about this lost Modigliani, he sees it as the last chance to get his life back on track.
Peter Usher is an up and coming artist who has been misled and cheated by art gallery owners, like Charles Lampeth. He also, unwittingly, has become mired in the Modigliani scandal, even as he puts in place a diabolical plan to get even with the corrupt players in the art gallery world.
Needless to say, we are heading for a cockup that will leave one “winner” and a string of resentful losers.
Ken Follett published this book in 1976 under the pseudonym Zachary Stone. On the surface, this novel is a fun romp across Europe, chasing a lost masterpiece by one of the greatest Italian artists, but in the murky waters beneath, Follett is making some much larger points about the people who make money out of culture, but don’t necessarily support it. There was one plot twist that ventures into the implausible that twisted me so hard I nearly broke my neck, but then I have seen enough improbabilities in real life to not be too critical of an author who maybe is getting too clever. If you like art and are looking for a quick, enjoyable read, this will fill your brush with paint.
Sorry, that person's shelf is private.
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