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 Emmanuel Macron and the Future of Europe

May 12, 2022 / Volume LXIX, Number 8

THE ART ISSUE

French Gawkers • Women’s Self-Portraits • Volcanic Bernini

Rose Wylie’s Enchantments • Francis Kéré’s Light and Shade
Prospect.5 in New Orleans • Jacques Louis David at Work
Rosa Bonheur’s Beasts • John Bubbles and the Rhythms of Tap
22601.OUTLINES.indd 1 4/5/22 1:03 PM
Contents
4 Ruth Bernard Yeazell The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution, and Resilience: Five Hundred Years
of Women’s Self Portraits by Jennifer Higgie

10 Anahid Nersessian
The Self- Portrait by Natalie Rudd
Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems by Forough Farrokhzad,
translated from the Persian by Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.
HOW
16
20
23
Julian Barnes
Martin Filler
Caroline Fraser
Gawkers: Art and Audience in Late Nineteenth-Century France by Bridget Alsdorf
Momentum of Light by Iwan Baan and Francis Kéré
A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in US History by Francesca Morgan
WE HURT
26 Carolina A. Miranda Prospect.5: ‘Yesterday we said tomorrow’ an exhibition in various locations in New Orleans
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi
29 Adam Hochschild Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury by Evan Osnos
Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump
by Spencer Ackerman
American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears by Farah Stockman
32 David Salle Going on Her Nerve
35 Gary Saul Morson March 1917: The Red Wheel/Node III (8 March–31 March): Book 3
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz
Between Two Millstones: Book 2, Exile in America, 1978–1994 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
translated from the Russian by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore
36 Elisa Gabbert Poem
38 Ingrid D. Rowland Bernini and His World: Sculpture and Sculptors in Early Modern Rome by Livio Pestilli
40 Christopher Benfey Here and There: Sites of Philosophy by Stanley Cavell, edited by Nancy Bauer,
Alice Crary, and Sandra Laugier
Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory by Stanley Cavell
42 Rowan Ricardo Phillips Poem
43 Regina Marler Art Is a Tyrant: The Unconventional Life of Rosa Bonheur by Catherine Hewitt
46 James McAuley Macron on the Precipice
and Madeleine Schwartz
49 Deborah Landau Poem
H A IDE R WA R R A IC H
50 Brian Seibert Sportin’ Life: John W. Bubbles, an American Classic by Brian Harker
52
55
James Oakes
Colin B. Bailey
The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America by Noah Feldman
Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, THE SONG OF
New York City

58 Letters from
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Perrin Stein
Kenneth Hermele, Seyla Benhabib, Cathy Curtis, and Aaron Poochigian OUR SCARS
CONTRIBUTORS The Untold Story of Pain
COLIN B. BAILEY is the Director of the Morgan Library and CAROLINA A. MIRANDA is the arts and urban design colum-
Museum. His books include Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art nist at the Los Angeles Times. She was a winner of the 2017 Rabkin
in Pre-Revolutionary Paris, which was awarded the 2004 Mitchell Prize in Visual Arts Journalism.
Prize, and Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting.
GARY SAUL MORSON is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of
JULIAN BARNES’s books include The Only Story and The Man the Arts and Humanities and a Professor in the Slavic Languages
“Insightful and humane. . . .
in the Red Coat. His latest novel, Elizabeth Finch, will be published and Literatures Department at Northwestern. His latest book is
in the US in August. Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us, co- A marvelous read.”
CHRISTOPHER BENFEY is the Mellon Professor of English at written with Morton Schapiro.
Mount Holyoke. His most recent book is IF : The Untold Story of ANAHID NERSESSIAN is a Professor of English at the Univer-
— DR . S IDDH A R T H A
Kipling’s American Years. sity of California at Los Angeles. A new edition of her book Keats’s
Odes: A Lover’s Discourse will be published in the fall.
MUK HE R JE E , author of
MARTIN FILLER’s latest book is Makers of Modern Architec-
ture, Volume III: From Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin, a collection of
JAMES OAKES is a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Gradu- The Emperor of All Maladies
his writing on architecture in these pages.
ate Center. His latest book is The Crooked Path to Abolition:
CAROLINE FRASER’s most recent book, Prairie Fires: The Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution.
American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, received the Pulitzer
Prize for Biography. ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS’s most recent book is Living
ELISA GABBERT is the author of The Unreality of Memory and
Weapon. He is the Poetry Editor of The New Republic. “A wonderful exploration
The Word Pretty. Normal Distance, a poetry collection, will be pub- INGRID D. ROWLAND is a Professor of History, Classics, and
lished in September. Architecture at the University of Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gate- of the chronic-pain
way. Her latest books are The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari
ADAM HOCHSCHILD’s next book, American Midnight: The
Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, will
and the Invention of Art, cowritten with Noah Charney, and The conundrum—past and
Divine Spark of Syracuse.
be published in October.
DAVID SALLE is a painter and essayist. The Brant Founda-
present—in all of its varied
DEBORAH LANDAU’s fifth book of poems, Skeletons, will be
tion in Greenwich presented a forty-year survey of his paintings
published next spring. She is a Professor and the Director of the
Creative Writing Program at NYU. last fall. dimensions: biomedical,
REGINA MARLER is the author of Bloomsbury Pie: The Making
of the Bloomsbury Boom. She edited Queer Beats: How the Beats
BRIAN SEIBERT is the author of What the Eye Hears: A History
of Tap Dancing. He teaches at Yale.
psychological, social,
Turned America on to Sex and Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell.
RUTH BERNARD YEAZELL is Sterling Professor of English and economic. Warraich is
JAMES MCAULEY is a Paris-based contributing columnist for The at Yale. Her books include Picture Titles: How and Why Western
Washington Post and the author of The House of Fragile Things: Jewish
Art Collectors and the Fall of France. MADELEINE SCHWARTZ is
Paintings Acquired Their Names and Art of the Everyday: Dutch
Painting and the Realist Novel. She is writing a book about the
truly a gifted storyteller.”
a regular contributor to The New York Review based in Paris. modern reception of Vermeer.
— DR . DA MON T W E E DY,
Editor: Emily Greenhouse
Deputy Editor: Michael Shae
Publisher: Rea S. Hederman
Associate Publisher, Business Operations: Michael King
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Art Editor: Leanne Shapton
Lauren Kane, Managing Editor; Daniel Drake, Associate Editor, Digital; Lucy Jakub, Associate Editor; Nawal Arjini and Willa Glickman, Assistant Editors;
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Founding Editors: Barbara Epstein (1928–2006) and Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017)
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— BE T H M A C Y,
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On the cover: Félix Vallotton, Autoportrait à l’âge de vingt ans, 1885 (© Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne). The engraving on page 6 is by Adamo Scul-
tori, after Michelangelo, 1585.
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3

The Mirror and the Palette:
Rebellion, Revolution,
and Resilience:
Five Hundred Years of
Women’s Self Portraits
by Jennifer Higgie.
Pegasus, 328 pp., $27.95
The Self- Portrait
by Natalie Rudd.
Thames and Hudson,
175 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Among the legendary figures whose
stories Giovanni Boccaccio relates
in Famous Women (1361–1362) is a
Roman virgin named Marcia, who
earned her fame as much for her skills
as an artist, he tells us, as for her chas-
tity. Both outpacing and outearning her
contemporaries, the energetic Marcia
is said to have worked in ivory as well
as paint, but the only object Boccaccio
specifically describes is a self-portrait,
“painted on a panel with the aid of a
mirror.” A charming illumination from
an early-fifteenth- century French man-
uscript shows Marcia at work on the
picture, her visage tripled, as she gazes
at the small convex mirror reflecting
her face in her left hand, while her right
wields a brush with which she touches
up the lips of the painted image.
It’s tempting to imagine that the un-
known illuminator was also a woman,
who perhaps amused herself by multi-
plying her own features in multiplying
Marcia’s. Presumably she would have
been less amused to learn that Boccac-
cio nonetheless seems to have judged
the admirable Marcia an anomaly. The
Greek painter Irene “merited some
praise,” he explains elsewhere in the
book, “because the art of painting is
mostly alien to the feminine mind and
cannot be attained without that great in-
tellectual concentration which women,
as a rule, are very slow to acquire.”
While a half- century of feminist art
history has provided us with all too
many such passages, it has also taught
us to recast the terms in which they are
formulated—to understand women’s
relative lack of artistic achievement
not as a consequence of “the feminine
mind” but of institutional constraints
that, deliberately or not, prevented them
from receiving the training and encour-
agement that might have enabled their
gifts to flourish. Linda Nochlin’s “Why
Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?” (1971) famously adduced the
taboo on drawing from the nude model,
a fundamental exercise for anyone who
aspired to paint those grand scenes
from myth and history that long ranked
as the pinnacle of the art.
Other institutions, from the appren-
ticeship system to the royal academies,
posed related obstacles, as did, of
course, the pressures exerted by hus-
bands and families. It’s clearly not by
chance that Boccaccio describes Mar-
cia as both legally independent and a
lifelong virgin, or that he tells us how
she avoided painting images of men,
lest the ancient custom of rendering
them in the nude conflict with her
“maidenly delicacy.” What she obvi-
ously could do, on the other hand, was
paint her own portrait. All she needed
has been laid out with precision by the
medieval illuminator: a set of brushes
4 The New York Review
Painting Herself
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Sofonisba Anguissola: Self-Portrait at the Easel Painting a Devotional Panel, circa 1556
and paints, a support for the picture, a
palette, and a mirror.
S tudies of the self-portrait have often
emphasized the centrality of the mirror
to the development of the genre, but
Jennifer Higgie argues that its reflect-
ing surface proved particularly liberat-
ing for female painters. “It meant that,
for the first time, their exclusion from
the life class didn’t stop them paint-
ing figures,” she declares early in The
Mirror and the Palette. “Now, with the
aid of a looking glass, they had a will-
ing model, and one who was available
around the clock: themselves.”
The point is well taken, even if the
chronology behind these somewhat
breathless pronouncements is notably
loose. Higgie begins her account with
the story of Marcia, whose mirror-
assisted picture can in turn be traced
back to a report by Pliny the Elder in
AD 77 of a female painter named Iaia
of Cyzicus—the first recorded allusion
in Western literature, as it happens, to a
self-portrait painted with a mirror. Im-
mediately before the lines just quoted,
Higgie refers to the mass production
of mirrors made possible by a German
invention of 1835, but that date can
hardly represent the liberating moment
she has in mind, since it would exclude
almost half the paintings reproduced in
her book, including some particularly
strong examples from the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. In The Self-
Portrait: A Cultural History (2014),
James Hall argued, in fact, that the ef-
florescence of the genre in Europe be-
ginning around 1500 owes more to “the
late medieval fascination with the sci-
ence and symbolism of mirrors” than
to any developments in technology. If
Alamy
a number of gifted women at that time
began to paint themselves too, they
may have been responding as much to
the liberating opportunities opened up
by other artists as to some newfound
access to their own reflections.
There is, however, a striking differ-
ence between the images they produced
and those of their male counterparts,
and in this, too, the illumination of
Marcia is exemplary: from the begin-
ning, the women chose to show them-
selves at work. While male artists of the
period typically sought to elevate their
status by representing themselves as
gentlemen, far removed from the mate-
rial business of painting, female artists
seem to have been more concerned to
demonstrate that they could handle a
brush as well as anyone.
In 1548 the Flemish painter Cath-
arina van Hemessen produced what
is generally regarded as the first self-
portrait of any artist in the act of paint-
ing. Clutching a tiny palette and set
of brushes in one hand and propping
the other on a maulstick as she grasps
the brush with which she apparently
outlines her own head on a canvas,
the creator of this Self-Portrait at the
Easel seems determined to crowd as
many of the tools of her trade into its
small surface as possible.1 (The entire
picture measures approximately 12 by
9 1/2 inches.) Lest anyone doubt the
significance of the image, she also took
care to add an inscription in Latin: “I
Caterina van Hemessen have painted
myself/1548 /Her age 20.”
1
The painting was reproduced in these
pages to accompany Jenny Uglow’s
review of Michael Pye, Europe’s Bab-
ylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp’s
Golden Age, February 24, 2022.
T
he difference women made is viv-
idly on display in Natalie Rudd’s The
Self-Portrait, which begins its brief
survey of the genre with the magnif-
icent painting of a man in a red tur-
ban by Jan van Eyck that Rudd says is
often considered “the earliest autono-
mous self-portrait (one with the artist
as the central focus) in existence.” It
follows that up with Albrecht Dürer’s
depiction of himself in the likeness
of Christ (1500) and Parmigianino’s
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (circa
1523), among other works, before turn-
ing to the book’s first female artist, So-
fonisba Anguissola, who also provides
its first image of a painter at work. (The
artist, in her mid-twenties at the time,
would go on to become the most pro-
lific self-portraitist in Europe between
Dürer and Rembrandt.)
Completed around a decade after
Van Hemessen’s picture, Anguissola’s
Self-Portrait at the Easel Painting a De-
votional Panel (circa 1556) bears some
notable resemblances to its predeces-
sor, from the half-length format to the
artist’s pose and the orientation of her
hands. Indeed, the resemblances are so
conspicuous that Higgie, who includes
both pictures, finds herself wondering
whether the two women might have
met: a speculation at once encouraged
and frustrated by the knowledge that
they nearly crossed paths at the Span-
ish court of Philip II, where Anguissola
arrived not long after Van Hemessen,
who had been invited there by Philip’s
aunt Mary of Hungary, had departed.
But by representing herself in the act
of painting a Virgin and Child, the Ital-
ian artist also does something differ-
ent from her Flemish predecessor—at
once demonstrating her skill as a his-
tory painter and implicitly identifying
herself with the patron saint of artists,
Saint Luke, who is traditionally shown
working on just such a picture. Another
inscription drives home the argument:
“I, Sofonisba Anguissola, unmarried,
am the equal of the Muses and Apelles
in playing my songs and handling my
paints.” Acknowledging the material
basis of their art evidently didn’t pre-
vent female painters from staking a
claim to its loftier aspirations too.
A still more daring self-portrait by
the seventeenth- century Italian painter
Artemisia Gentileschi offers a fur-
ther twist on the theme. For her Self-
Portrait as the Allegory of Painting
(1638–1639), which was probably pro-
duced on a trip to London, she draws
on Cesare Ripa’s popular emblem
book, Iconologia (1593–1603), in order
to equate her own energetic body with
the figure of Painting itself. Artemisia
adheres to Ripa’s specifications for rep-
resenting Painting just closely enough
to make her intentions clear—like him,
she depicts a beautiful woman with
disheveled black hair and a mask dan-
gling from a gold chain at her throat—
while discarding those elements that
she appears to have resisted.2
As Higgie observes, Artemisia does
away with the mouth covering that
2
I follow the convention of identifying
the artist by her first name in order
to distinguish her from her father, the
painter Orazio Gentileschi.
 A Little History of Art
Charlotte Mullins
Traitor, Survivor, Icon:
The Legacy of La Malinche
Edited by Victoria I. Lyall and
Terezita Romo
Published in association with the Denver Art
Museum
Alberto Giacometti:
Toward the Ultimate Figure
Edited by Emilie Bouvard
Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of Art
Yale university press
May 12, 2022
Nonconformers: How to Enjoy Art: Franz Kafka: Yield: The Journal of
A New History of A Guide for Everyone The Drawings an Artist
Self-Taught Artists Edited by Andreas Kilcher Anne Truitt
Ben Street
Lisa Slominski in collaboration with Foreword by Rachel Kushner
Pavel Schmidt
Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents Water, Wind, Breath: Raphael
Stephanie L. Herdrich and Southwest Native Art in the Tom Henry and David Ekserdjian
Sylvia Yount Barnes Foundation
Published by National Gallery Company/
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Edited by Lucy Fowler Williams Distributed by Yale University Press
Distributed by Yale University Press Distributed for the Barnes Foundation
In America: Joshua Rashaad McFadden: Cezanne
A Lexicon of Fashion I Believe IÕll Run On Edited by Achim Borchardt-Hume,
Andrew Bolton and Amanda With an essay by LaCharles Ward Gloria Groom, Caitlin Haskell, and
Garfinkel, with Jessica Regan and and a conversation between Natalia Sidlina
Stephanie Kramer Joshua Rashaad McFadden and Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Lyle Ashton Harris
Distributed by Yale University Press Published in association with the
George Eastman Museum



  
5

The 2022 – 2023 Fellows
Levy/Sloan Fellow
Tatiana Brailovskaya
for a biography of for a biography of
Henry Bigelow
Avi Steinberg
for a biography of
Grace Paley
Congratulations to Rebecca Donner
2018 - 2019 Leon Levy Fellow and winner of the 2022 National Book Critics
Circle Award for ‘All the Frequent Trouble of Our Days: the True Story of
the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler’
The 2022 BIO conference will take place online May 13 – 15
biographersinternational.org/conference/2022-bio-conference
6 The New York Review
denotes Painting’s silence in Ripa and
removes the word “imitation” from the
mask, as if to convey that she imitates
no one. She also ignores Ripa’s instruc-
tion that Painting’s tools should ap-
pear at the figure’s feet, where they are
meant to signify that hers is “a noble
exercise,” which “cannot be done with-
out much application of the intellect.”
Rather than subordinate the work of
the hands to that of the mind, in other
words, Artemisia chooses to show a
fully embodied Painting vigorously
manipulating the tools of her trade.
Compared with some of the works for
which she has become famous—her
early Susannah and the Elders (1610),
for example, or the multiple paintings
of strong women committing acts of
violence, like Salome with the Head of
John the Baptist (1610–1615) or Judith
Slaying Holofernes (circa 1620)—the
premise of this picture may seem tame,
but the confidence and boldness with
which it was executed make for a pow-
erful self-portrait.
Nicholas Forster Jane Kamensky T hough I have suggested that women
for a biography of artists entered the field by rendering
Bill Gunn Candida Royalle their labor visible rather than effacing
it, their willingness to get their hands
dirty—or at least to represent them-
selves as doing so—clearly had its limits.
With the partial exception of Artemisia,
who wears a brown apron over her silky
dress and has apparently rolled up a
voluminous sleeve on the arm nearest
her canvas, no one in these early self-
portraits looks as if she ever spilled a
drop of paint. Van Hemessen’s arms ap-
pear to be encased in velvet; Anguisso-
la’s wrists and collar sport demure white
ruffles. In another Self-Portrait as the
Krithika Varagur Allegory of Painting (1658) made two
for a group biography decades after Artemisia’s, the twenty-
of the Princesses year-old Elisabetta Sirani sits at her
Duleep Singh easel in a low-cut gown and lavish cape,
her hair wreathed with laurel.
Even the Dutch artist Judith Ley-
ster, who flirts with propriety by part-
ing her lips in a smile and gesturing
with her brush at the groin of the man
she is painting, compensates for her
cheekiness by decking herself out in an
elegant bodice and magnificent white
ruff. Leyster’s self-portrait, which
dates from around 1630, was attributed
for more than two centuries to Frans
Hals, until scholars finally decoded the
monogram that served as her signature:
“JL*”—a play on her name and leid-
star, the Dutch word for “lodestar.”
For anyone who’s ever been told to
smile for a camera, Leyster’s expres-
sion may seem unsurprising, but her
willingness to show some teeth already
represents a small departure from de-
corum. Higgie identifies a possible pre-
cursor in a 1554 sketch by Anguissola
of a broadly smiling young girl teach-
ing an old woman to read, but even if
Higgie is right that the artist modeled
the girl on herself, it seems doubtful
that she meant this genre scene to be
viewed as a self-portrait.
On the other hand, Anguissola may
well have been the first woman painter
to risk depicting herself in old age. In
a self-portrait from around 1610 (not
included by Higgie), the elderly artist,
nearing eighty, sits firmly upright in a
red chair, one hand holding a letter and
Applications now open for a new M.A. Program the other marking her place in a book.
It’s a dignified image but scarcely an
in Biography and Memoir: gc.cuny.edu/bam exercise in self-flattery, as the painter
scrupulously records her thinning hair,
bulbous nose, and narrow lips pursed
over a mouth evidently lacking in teeth.
By comparison, Rosalba Carriera’s
Self-Portrait as Winter (1730–1731),
elegantly coiffed in ermine, is an ideal-
ized picture of an aging artist, though
Higgie may not be altogether wrong to
characterize Carriera’s representation
of her own features as “brutally hon-
est.” (Carriera, it should be noted, was
twenty years younger than Anguissola
had been in 1610.)
But the most haunting depiction of
old age in The Mirror and the Palette
comes from the brush of the Finnish
painter Helene Schjerfbeck, whose
Self-Portrait with Red Spot (1944) is
among over twenty such images the art-
ist completed while holed up in neutral
Sweden during the final years of World
War II. Schjerfbeck, who was eighty-
two at the time and dying of stomach
Alamy
cancer, reduces herself to a hairless
skull with one eye seemingly widened
in terror and features that appear to
be dissolving into the canvas. A sin-
gle patch of bright red on her lower lip
disrupts the painter’s otherwise nearly
monochrome brushstrokes and adds a
note of ambiguity to an already unset-
tling image. What looks to Higgie like
“a drop of blood or a target,” Rudd—
who also discusses the picture—sees as
“a spirit of defiance, a spark of life.” But
both writers are clearly moved by the
brushstrokes through which a ghostly
Schjerfbeck self- consciously enacts the
process of her own mortality.
T he aging face is one thing, however,
the naked body another—at least when
the body in question is that of a woman
painting herself. Higgie organizes her
book thematically rather than chrono-
logically, and she saves her chapter
entitled “Naked” for last. It starts off
with what she identifies as “the earliest
known painting of a naked self-portrait
by a woman”: Paula Modersohn-
Becker’s Self-Portrait on Her Sixth
Wedding Anniversary (1906). Strictly
speaking, the figure is bare-breasted
rather than naked, since a white cloth
below her waist conceals her thighs and
genitals, but what is even more remark-
able than her uncovered torso is the
swollen belly that unmistakably identi-
fies her as pregnant. To the best anyone
can determine, however, this aspect of
the self-portrait is a fiction: a kind of vi-
sual experiment by which she could both
identify with the most traditional form
of female creativity and radically break
with it, announcing the pregnancy as
entirely the work of her own mind and
hands. Signed with her maiden initials,
“P. B.,” and painted at a time when the
 Explore Our
New Exhibitions

Louise Bourgeois: Winslow Homer: Charles Ray:

Paintings Crosscurrents Figure Ground
Through August 7 Through July 31 Through June 5
Rare early work from an iconic artist as A new look at the famous painter’s Groundbreaking, profound works from
she was finding her voice. lifelong fascination with struggle. the American sculptor’s 50-year career.

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Louise Bourgeois: Paintings
is made possible by The Modern Circle,
The Easton Foundation, and the Eugene V.
and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust.
The catalogue is made possible by
The Modern Circle.
Louise Bourgeois in the studio of her apartment at
142 East 18th Street (detail), ca. 1946. © The Easton
Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights
Society (ARS), NY.
Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents
is made possible by The Peter Jay Sharp
Foundation.
Corporate sponsorship is provided by
Additional support is provided by the
Barrie A. and Deedee Wigmore Foundation,
the Terra Foundation for American Art,
White & Case LLP, the Enterprise Holdings
Endowment, and Ann M. Spruill and
Daniel H. Cantwell.
This exhibition is supported by an
indemnity from the Federal Council on
the Arts and the Humanities.
It is organized by The Metropolitan
Museum of Art and The National Gallery,
London.
The catalogue is made possible by
the William Cullen Bryant Fellows of
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Additional support is provided by the
Wyeth Foundation for American Art
and Elizabeth Marsteller Gordon.
Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (detail), 1899;
reworked by 1906. The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection,
Wolfe Fund, 1906.
Charles Ray: Figure Ground
is made possible by the Barrie A.
and Deedee Wigmore Foundation.
Additional support is provided by the Jane
and Robert Carroll Fund, Angela A. Chao and
Jim Breyer, Lisa and Steven Tananbaum,
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual
Arts, the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund,
and the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund.
The catalogue is made possible by
Lannan Foundation and The Sachs
Charitable Foundation.
Charles Ray, Mime (detail), 2014. Kunstmuseum
Basel. © Charles Ray, Courtesy Matthew Marks
Gallery. Photo by Josh White.

May 12, 2022 7

thirty-year-old artist was seriously chaf-
ing at her marriage (“I am I,” she wrote
that same year, “and I hope to become
so more and more”), the work gains
greater poignancy from the knowledge
that its maker became pregnant the fol-
lowing year and died in the immediate
aftermath of her daughter’s birth.
The emotional contrast with the
image of another naked woman that con-
cludes Higgie’s book—Alice Neel’s Self-
Portrait (1980)—couldn’t be sharper.
Neel herself painted many portraits of
pregnant women over the course of her
long career, but in this picture she turns
her gaze on her own naked and aging
body. Composed when she was as old as
the century, Neel’s Self-Portrait doesn’t
hesitate to depict her sagging breasts
and belly or the flabbiness of her upper
arms. But there is nothing flabby about
how she perches on her blue-and-white
chair, one hand grasping a brush while
the other holds a paint rag, and looks
keenly through her spectacles at the
viewer.
“I paint myself because I am alone,”
Frida Kahlo observed in her diary. “I
am the subject I know best.” The ex-
treme constraints under which she ex-
ecuted much of her work were unique
to Kahlo: bedridden from the com-
bined effects of childhood polio and
a terrible bus accident in adolescence,
she took to making self-portraits with
the aid of a mirror suspended above
her. But something like her sentiment
recurs from others as well. “I painted
myself because I knew her,” the Aus-
tralian artist Nora Heysen remarked,
adding, “With self-portraits you can
be alone with yourself and not have
to worry about another person.” Hey-
sen, who compared self-portraiture to
“an animal marking out its territory,”
was attempting to escape from the in-
fluence of her famous father, the land-
scape painter Hans Heysen—one of a
number of such father- daughter pairs
that figure in Higgie’s book.
But even self-portraits, of course,
are also made of other paintings. Hig-
gie calls attention to some prominent
cases: how Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s
Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782) pays
mischievous homage to Rubens’s so-
called Chapeau de Paille (circa 1622–
1625), for instance, even as she tacitly
corrects its erroneous French title by
substituting an actual straw hat (cha-
peau de paille) for the beaver felt of the
original; or how the Hungarian-Indian
artist Amrita Sher- Gil plays on her
own ambiguous identity, while offering
an implicit critique of Gauguin’s exoti-
cized figures, by posing bare-breasted
for her Self-Portrait as Tahitian (1934).
At other times, however, Higgie lets
similar opportunities slide. Though
she notes in passing that Heysen’s Self-
Portrait of 1932 poses the artist’s head
against a reproduction of a Vermeer on
the wall behind her, she fails to regis-
ter that the work in question is The Art
of Painting (circa 1662–1668), and that
Heysen preserves the mirrored orien-
tation of the picture-within-the-picture
and partly obscures its female model,
as if to underscore that she prefers to
identify with the painter. (Heysen later
characterized Vermeer and Piero della
Francesca as her “gods.”) Nor does
Higgie ever take up James Hall’s res-
onant comments on how Modersohn-
Becker’s Self-Portrait on Her Sixth
Wedding Anniversary at once echoes
and transforms Raphael’s portrait La
Fornarina (1518–1519): “Whereas that
8 The New York Review
picture proclaimed the great artist’s
ownership of his model (he signed her
armband), Becker’s self-portrait im-
plies that this model is self- creating and
indeed self-reproducing.”
The Mirror and the Palette is not the
first book on female self-portraiture,
having been preceded by Frances
Borzello’s groundbreaking—and more
comprehensive—study, Seeing Our-
selves: Women’s Self-Portraits (1998).
But the fact that none of the painters
in either work appeared in the standard
textbooks on which my generation was
raised—Higgie specifically mentions
Nora Heysen: Self-Portrait, 1932
E. H. Gombrich’s Story of Art (1950)
and H.W. Janson’s History of Art
(1962) —is a sobering reminder that
what we learn to see depends almost as
much on the pen as it does on the paint-
brush, especially for those whose gifts
are apt to be questioned or overlooked
in the first place. Recording your name
is clearly no guarantee of immortality,
but it’s no accident, I think, that pio-
neers like Van Hemessen and Anguis-
sola took such care to inscribe what
they had achieved on their canvases, or
that so many of the women who figure
in The Mirror and the Palette appear
to have been prolific writers as well as
painters.
Despite Artemisia’s unusual fame in
her lifetime, few of her self-portraits
survive: we primarily know about
them, Higgie reports, from the artist’s
voluminous correspondence. “I will
show Your illustrious Lordship what a
woman can do,” one such letter char-
acteristically announced to her patron.
“You will find the spirit of Caesar in
the soul of a woman,” declared another.
The written word also helped shape the
career of the seventeenth- century Brit-
ish painter Mary Beale, whose advice
on how to paint apricots, composed in
1663, is not only the first known piece
of writing about art by a woman but one
of the earliest accounts of artistic tech-
nique in English. Beale’s reputation got
a further boost when a relative by mar-
riage, Samuel Woodford, attributed a
few passages of his Paraphrase Upon
the Psalms of David (1667) to “the
truly vertuous Mrs. Mary Beale”—an
imprimatur that apparently confirmed
her respectability as a portraitist, espe-
cially among the clergy.
In 1835 and 1836, the more reputa-
tionally challenged Vigée Le Brun, the
Bridgeman Images
favorite painter of Marie Antoinette,
capped a tumultuous career in image
management with three volumes of
best-selling autobiography. Later in the
century, the posthumous publication
of The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff
(1887) turned the fiercely ambitious
young Russian, dead of consumption
at twenty-five, into an international
phenomenon. “As a man, I should
have conquered Europe,” Bashkirtseff
had written in the journal four months
before her death; and though it is her
Self-Portrait with Palette (1880) that
accounts for her appearance in Hig-
gie’s book, she ultimately had more im-
pact as a writer. Among the journal’s
many admirers were George Bernard
Shaw, Katherine Mansfield, and Anaïs
Nin, as well as the twenty-two-year- old
Paula Becker, who responded to its
author’s example by concluding, “I’ve
wasted my first 20 years.”
Modersohn-Becker’s own letters and
journals in turn became posthumous
best sellers and the initial source of her
fame, though she, unlike Bashkirtseff,
is now better known for her painting.
Even the British Surrealist Leonora
Carrington, who explicitly downplayed
the power of words—“There are things
that are not sayable. That’s why we
have art”—was a writer as well as a
painter, whose memoir and short sto-
ries provide Higgie with keys by which
to unlock, however partially, a myste-
rious Self-Portrait (1937–1938) with a
lactating hyena and a rocking horse.
Avowedly “meandering and per-
sonal,” Higgie’s book is surprisingly
word-heavy for a study of visual art:
her publishers have chosen to repro-
duce only twenty-seven pictures, one of
which goes oddly unmentioned in the
text. (There are more reproductions of
women’s self-portraits in Rudd’s short
handbook than in The Mirror and the
Palette, despite the fact that Rudd aims
to survey the entire genre.)
Though Higgie is herself a painter,
she appears at least as concerned to
offer readable accounts of her subjects’
lives as to analyze their work, espe-
cially its more material dimensions. In
2005–2006 the National Portrait Gal-
lery in London and the Art Gallery of
New South Wales cosponsored a major
exhibition on the self-portrait from the
Renaissance to the present that delib-
erately confined itself to oil painting,
on the grounds that “the mirror-like
gloss and perceived transparency of
illusionistic painting in oils dramatises
the relationship between the images
of themselves that artists observed in
mirrors and the perfect paintings that
they produced,” but Higgie doesn’t en-
gage the argument, despite her interest
in mirrors. 3 Nor does she always make
clear the medium in which her subjects
were working, though unlike Rudd—
whose expansive definition of the
self-portrait includes everything from
a plaster torso by Louise Bourgeois
and a Faith Ringgold quilt to instal-
lation art like Tracey Emin’s My Bed
(1998)—Higgie limits her self-portraits
to paintings.
Among the variations on the genre
with which Rudd’s book concludes are
several that might be termed indexical
self-portraits: works that originated not
in mirror images but in physical traces
of the artist’s presence. Emin’s My Bed
partly qualifies as such a work, and so,
clearly, does Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s
Breath (1960), despite the fact that the
balloon formerly inflated by its creator
has since collapsed into a flaccid resi-
due of its former self.
From the perspective of the past sev-
eral years, however, perhaps the most
evocative such object in Rudd’s col-
lection is another work by a woman
artist: Helen Chadwick’s Viral Land-
scape No. 3 (1988–1989). The image,
which belongs to a digitally assisted
series created during the AIDS crisis,
was generated by overlaying cell sam-
ples taken from the artist’s own body
and prints made by swirling pigments
into the waves along the Welsh coast-
line with panoramic landscape photo-
graphs. Viral Landscape No. 3 looks
nothing like a self-portrait as it has
been conventionally understood. But
its representation of that self’s immer-
sion in the natural world, at once beau-
tiful and terrifying, couldn’t be more
timely. Q
3
Anthony Bond and Joanna Woodall,
Self-Portrait: Renaissance to Contem-
porary (London: National Portrait
Gallery, 2005), p. 11.
 May 15-Sept 5
Catalogue available at publications.artic.edu

The exhibition is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern, London.
Lead support for Cezanne is generously provided by John D. and Alexandra C. Nichols.
Major funding is contributed by an anonymous donor, The Marlene and Spencer Hays Foundation, the Butler Family Foundation, Richard F. and Christine F. Karger, the Shure
Charitable Trust, Constance and David Coolidge, Amy and Paul Carbone, and Patricia and Ronald Taylor. Special support is provided by Dora and John Aalbregtse, Julie and
Roger Baskes, Ethel and Bill Gofen, Natasha Henner and Bala Ragothaman, Barbara and Marc Posner, Margot Levin Schiff and the Harold Schiff Foundation, and Linda and
Michael Welsh. Additional funding is provided by the Jack and Peggy Crowe Fund, the Suzanne and Wesley M. Dixon Exhibition Fund, and The Regenstein Foundation Fund.
Members of the Luminary Trust provide annual leadership support for the museum’s operations, including exhibition development, conservation and collection care, and
educational programming. The Luminary Trust includes an anonymous donor, Neil Bluhm and the Bluhm Family Charitable Foundation, Karen Gray-Krehbiel and John Krehbiel,
Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, Josef and Margot Lakonishok, Robert M. and Diane v.S. Levy, Ann and Samuel M.
Mencoff, Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel, Anne and Chris Reyes, Cari and Michael J. Sacks, and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation. This exhibition is supported by an
indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Paul Cezanne. Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) (detail), about 1894-1905. The National Gallery, London, purchased with special grant and the aid of the Max Rayne Foundation, 1964.
Corporate Sponsor

May 12, 2022 9


Let Us Believe in the
Beginning of the Cold
Season: Selected Poems
by Forough Farrokhzad,
translated from the Persian
by Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.
New Directions, 107 pp.,
$16.95 (paper)
The title poem of Forough
Farrokhzad’s first collec-
tion, Captive, was written
in 1954, when Farrokhzad
was nineteen and her son
Kamyar was a toddler. Far-
rokhzad had been married
for two years, having left
high school to wed a distant
relative and well-respected
writer named Parviz Shapur.
Married life did not agree
with her; she had fallen for
someone else. Still, Far-
rokhzad understood very
well what leaving would
mean. For her, it would be
both tangible—as a divorced
woman, she would lose all
legal rights to her child—and
psychological. For Kamyar,
or so his mother suspected,
the disintegration of his
family would mean the col-
lapse of his entire world.
Addressed to the lover she
longs for but refuses to join,
“Captive” rearranges the
love triangle of a husband, a
wife, and her paramour into
a tug-of-war between erotic
longing and maternal obliga-
tion, between freedom and
its collateral damage:
I want you, and I know that never
will I hold you as my heart desires
You are that clear bright sky
I am a captive bird in the corner
of this cage . . .
I am thinking and I know that
never
will I have the resolve to leave this
cage
Even if it were the jailor’s wish
I have no strength left for flight
From beyond the bars each bright
morning
A child’s gaze smiles in my face
When I begin a joyous song
his lips come to me with a kiss
O sky, if I wish one day
to fly from this silent prison
what will I say to the eyes of the
crying child?
Leave me be, I am a captive bird
I am the candle whose burning
heart
lights up a ruin
If I choose silence
I will shred a nest
“Captive”—included in Elizabeth
T. Gray Jr.’s luminous new translation
of Farrokhzad’s Let Us Believe in the
Beginning of the Cold Season, a post-
humous selection first published in
1974— may trade in familiar tropes
of bondage and imprisonment, but
its speaker’s grievances are surpris-
10
Catastrophic Desires
Anahid Nersessian
Forough Farrokhzad; illustration by Juman Malouf
ingly complex. She does not resent
her spouse, nor does she ask her lover
to come to her rescue. She is afraid of
the consequences for someone who
can neither choose nor refuse them.
The poem ends with images that sug-
gest a total dereliction of parental duty:
a child left alone in the dark, in the
rubble of a home made uninhabitable
by his mother’s absence. In another
poem on the same theme, Farrokhzad
searches an abandoned room for any
trace of her son only to find it “empty
of his childish voice,” nothing “left but
a name.”
For Farrokhzad, all desire is cata-
strophic. In her poetry, love promises
loss, sex promises despair, and moth-
erhood—which seems to demand a
total renunciation of one’s own needs
and ambitions—defeats the spirit. The
tropes of imprisonment and captivity
are uniquely driven by Farrokhzad’s
experiences as a woman in Iran in
the decades before the Islamic Revo-
lution of 1979. As lyric statements of
emotional anguish and existential un-
rest, these poems actively court the
description “universal”: they seem,
sometimes, as though they could have
been written by anyone, at any time,
in any place. And yet in their empha-
sis on freedom’s ethical contradictions
and costs, they belong irreducibly to
a particular moment in time. In the
words of Farzaneh Milani, whose
2017 biography of Farrokhzad has yet
to be translated, her poetry speaks “of
a confusion that in many of her read-
ers remains unarticulated,” and of
the trials of “a whole generation” un-
dergoing traumas both intimate and
historical.
In reality Farrokhzad flew the coop.
She left her husband and child and
threw herself into a life that would have
been impossible within the boundaries
of a traditional marriage. As a single
woman, she was able to write, paint,
pursue the relationships that interested
her, and weave her erotic encounters
into poems whose candor is still unset-
tling. And yet, she could not escape her
yearning for Kamyar, whom she was
not allowed to see without his father’s
permission. Following her divorce in
1955, she had a nervous breakdown and
spent a month in a psychiatric clinic,
where—like Sylvia Plath, the poet to
whom she is most often compared in
the English-speaking world—she un-
derwent electroconvulsive therapy.
“My arms and legs get tied up with my
own bleak imaginings,” she wrote, “and
then I see that I can no longer have the
power to resist, that I am done with this
life, and that everyone is looking at me
with condescension.”
Nonetheless, Farrokhzad did not
return to her husband and did not
remarry. Instead, she kept writing,
eventually abandoning the traditional
forms of her earlier work to become a
staunch partisan of free verse. She also
began making films, including the as-
tonishing documentary The House Is
Black, released in 1963. Set
at a leper colony near Tabriz,
in the northwestern part of
the country, it is now consid-
ered an important precur-
sor to Iran’s cinematic New
Wave. In 1956 Farrokhzad
spent several months in Eu-
rope, learned Italian and
some German, and with her
brother Amir—then living
in Munich—translated an
anthology of twenty-nine
German poets, with an em-
phasis on Jewish and anti-
fascist writers. Working on
her own, she also translated
George Bernard Shaw and
Henry Miller. In the 1960s,
Bernardo Bertolucci went to
Iran to make a movie about
Farrokhzad. In it, she ap-
pears at once commanding
and fragile, huge dark eyes
glowing as she holds forth
on the social role of the art-
ist. When she died in a car
accident at the age of thirty-
two in 1967, it was front-page
news. As for the accident,
there is a persistent rumor
that she swerved to avoid a
school bus.
The Plath comparison is
unavoidable but provincial.
Though Farrokhzad has
been widely translated into
English, audiences outside
the Iranian diaspora have
found it difficult to grasp
her work on its own terms.
It is true that, like Plath, she
had a career bound by the
very public convergence of
the personal and the political, and that
she suffered mightily under the spoken
and unspoken rules of a patriarchal so-
ciety. Stylistically, however, there is very
little overlap. Plath is stealthy, stern,
hard-boiled. Farrokhzad, whose po-
etry is self- consciously entwined with
a long tradition of Persian erotic verse,
presents herself as a force of nature who
thrives in the clash of elemental oppo-
sites: hot and cold, water and iron. She
is, she says, a shoreline, a tarantula, a
fish, the stem of a plant “sucking in air
and sun and water/in order to live.”
There is another difference, as abso-
lute as style. Unlike Plath, Farrokhzad
was a dissident, albeit a slightly under-
cover one. Despite her reputation as a
poet of private life and sexual scandal,
she was a fierce critic of the Pahlavi
regime, which ended when Shah Mu-
hammad Reza Pahlavi fled Iran on Jan-
uary 16, 1979, and Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini announced the formation of
a provisional government. Although
she benefited directly from the Shah’s
emphasis on social liberalization, she
openly derided his attempt to modern-
ize the country at warp speed and its
immiserating effect on Iran’s poor.
More to the point, Farrokhzad writes
vividly about the widespread civil and
religious repression that characterized
the regime, a risky choice given that
SAVAK—the Shah’s infamous secret
police force, trained in methods of
torture by the CIA and Mossad—rou-
tinely rounded up, imprisoned, and ex-
ecuted artists, intellectuals, Marxists,
The New York Review
 New Art Books from Princeton

May 12, 2022 11

 and Muslim activists. In the scathing
poem “O Jeweled Land” (the title of
what was then the national anthem),
she contrasts the superficial freedom of
the chattering classes with the political
“Younger violence that lies just beneath her coun-
try’s surface:
writers I have stepped into the space of
were freed to existence where the creative
masses live
think about and although no bread can be
found there
it offers a field of wide- open
specifically vision
its actual geography defined
Jewish to the north by the fresh green of
Bullet Square
questions. to the south by Execution Square
and by Artillery Square in the
[Their] work center of town
has a narrower And from dawn until sunset, in
the shelter of a shining and safe
appeal. Only sky
six hundred and seventy- eight
time will tell plaster swans
along with six hundred and
if it is also seventy- eight angels
—angels made of mixed dirt and
a deeper one.” mud, by the way—
are busy proceeding with plans
—Adam Kirsch for stillness and silence
Farrokhzad died a decade before the
Shah’s fall, but she lived long enough
to see many of her friends and family
members either driven out of Iran or
jailed there. According to the scholar
Nima Mina, her brother Amir was
in Munich not just to attend medical
school but because the city had become
May 2022
a hub for left-wing Iranian students.
After the During her visit to Germany, Far-
rokhzad befriended a number of those
Golden Age: students, including Kurosh Lasha’i,
American Jewish writing who went on to form a revolutionary
in the twenty-first breakaway group from the communist
century Tudeh party, and Mehdi Khanbaba
Adam Kirsch
On the invention of a new Jewish America
Tehrani, who became a Maoist com-
Kaya Genç
mentator for Radio Beijing; both spent
Antisemitism and paranoia in Erdoğan’s Turkey
Patrick Mackie
time incarcerated by the Iranian gov-
The double life of Mozart’s great collaborator
Jo Glanville
ernment. As for Amir, he was involved
The Jews of Dublin
in the anticolonial Iranian National
Sarah Krasnostein
The exiles who avenged the Nazis Front, a political party that sought to
George Prochnik
W.G. Sebald and narratives of loss
nationalize Iran’s oil reserves and resist
the manipulation of its internal affairs
by Western powers.
Resistance was a family affair. In
time, four of Farrokhzad’s six siblings
relocated to Germany, including her
JQ248 brother Fereydoun, a renowned singer-
songwriter and activist who publicly
After The Golden criticized the Islamic Republic. In 1992
Age: American Fereydoun was stabbed to death—a
switchblade through his shoulder and
Jewish Writing in a kitchen knife through his mouth—in
his apartment in Bonn, during the pe-
the Twenty-First riod of so- called chain murders carried
Century out by Iranian intelligence against pub-
lic intellectuals as well as ordinary cit-
OUT NOW izens. According to one report, shortly
before his death Fereydoun had asked
Iran’s ambassador to Germany for help
returning home: he wanted to see his
mother.
H alf of my family comes from Iran,
but I knew very little about Farrokhzad
until college, when I snuck into a
screening of The House Is Black for a
documentary film class in which I was
not enrolled. At first I tried to get by
SUBSCRIBE AND SAVE without reading the English subtitles. It
was no good until a little under five min-
JEWISHQUARTERLY.COM utes in, when Farrokhzad, who narrates
some of the film in her quiet, youthful
12
voice, began reciting the days of the
week: “Šanbe, Yekšanbe, Došanbe”—
Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and so on.
I know these words because my grand-
mother, who was from Sari, in the prov-
ince of Mazandaran, would sometimes
use them interchangeably with “Shabat,
Kiraki, Yerkushabt’i,” which is how
you say Saturday, Sunday, Monday in
Armenian. Despite being born in Iran,
and despite having lived there until the
chaotic days just before the revolution
drove her abroad, my grandmother had
very limited Farsi, and she could never
read or write it. This in contrast to my
father, whose Persian is perfect even
though he has not been back to Tehran,
the city of his birth, since 1968 (not for
lack of trying).
For a long time my grandmother’s
shaky grasp of her national language
was a mystery to me. Like her depres-
sion, it shrouded her in a fog of social
as well as psychic isolation. Because
she could not speak Persian, she never
found a home with New York’s expa-
triate Iranian community; because she
could not speak English, she needed
help negotiating the supermarket, the
doctor’s office, the bus. The dual func-
tions of translator and comfort object
fell to me, which was difficult, but not
so difficult as the responsibility that
fell on her when she was eight and her
mother died following an illegal abor-
tion; such procedures still account for
13 percent of all maternal deaths in
Iran. Forced to leave school to care for
her three younger siblings, my grand-
mother gradually lost all but a few
words of her third-grade Persian, the
victim of a matrilineal dispossession
that skipped over my father and his
brother—boys of whom much was ex-
pected—to be passed on to me.
In “Do You Speak Persian?” the
poet Kaveh Akbar elegizes his own
vanishing intimacy with the language
of his childhood: “I have been so care-
less with the words I already have. //I
don’t remember how to say home /in my
first language, or lonely, or light.” This
position, which is also mine, is a pecu-
liar one to occupy when reading work
in translation. It’s a position neither
of complete ignorance nor effortless
knowledge but is instead characterized
by a mood of reluctant, embarrassing
dependence on the expositions of oth-
ers. Meanwhile, because Farrokhzad’s
poetry has become so important in
the Iranian diaspora, among a com-
munity of people for whom (as Akbar
says) “every step . . . /has been from one
tongue to another,” its translators carry
an uncommon burden. They don’t just
have to make the poetry legible: they
have to make it sound like home even
to people who have never been there.
Gray is very clear on what she takes
to be the power of Farrokhzad’s work.
“In a country where for centuries
women have lived silent, diminished,
and in the shadow of their men,” she
writes in her introduction, Farrokhzad
“broke all the rules.” For Gray, Far-
rokhzad’s politics are more expansively
humanist than specifically progressive;
at the same time, they are also more
narrowly trained on the pressures to
which women were and remain subject.
If this account leaves much unsaid, it
also reflects the heroic role Farrokhzad
has come to play in the diaspora follow-
ing the crackdown on women’s rights at
home, from a 1979 edict that made the
hijab compulsory to a recent law that
floats the possibility of turning abor-
tion into a capital offense. Without
having suffered under these exact cir-
cumstances, Farrokhzad has nonethe-
less become a symbol of resistance to
them.
As for the language, Gray—who has
also translated the fourteenth- century
poet Hafiz and the anthology Iran:
Poems of Dissent, featuring Iranian
writers from the Middle Ages to the
present day—has successfully resisted
the impulse to play up Farrokhzad’s
high- octane affect. The poetry is in-
tense, no doubt, and its passions are
real. Still, many of Farrokhzad’s En-
glish translators have hystericized
the verse, using words like “fevered”
where the less pathological “burning”
would do, or by trying to reproduce
the rhymes of Farrokhzad’s earlier
metrical poems and thus making her
sexual frankness seem at once naive
and contrived. The result is that many
translations have lost what Farrokhzad
described as the intention behind her
poetry, particularly her erotic poetry,
which she wrote not just to express
herself but also to match the complexi-
ties of twentieth- century life. “Modern
Persian poetry,” she said, presents love
as “so magnified, so plaintive, and so
anguished that it does not match the
nervous and hasty lines of today’s life.
Or else,” she added roguishly, it is “so
full of the pain of celibacy that it auto-
matically reminds one of male cats in
season on sunny roofs.”
It was important to Farrokhzad
that her poetry did not appear to be
in heat—that it convey desperation
without delirium and capture the am-
bivalence that suffuses even the most
heartfelt attachments. Even “Sin,” her
most famous poem, introduces a note
of hostility into what might otherwise
read as a simple ode to a good lay:
I sinned a sin full of pleasure
in an embrace that was warm and
fiery
I sinned in arms that were hot
and vindictive and made of
iron . . .
I sinned a sin full of pleasure
beside a dazed and trembling
body
O Lord, what do I know about
what I did
in that dark and silent sanctuary
The word Gray translates as “vindic-
tive” comes from the noun kine, mean-
ing hatred, spite, malevolence, or, most
suggestively, grudge, as in kine shotori,
used in the Persian expression “to hold
a grudge like a camel,” or the 2004
horror movie The Grudge, whose title
in Farsi is Kine. “Grudging” suggests
delay or demurral and wouldn’t work
here—these lovers are exceptionally
enthusiastic—but “vindictive” cap-
tures the abjection that accompanies
a desire to punish, the vulnerability of
the person who needs, very badly, to
get back at the person who’s wronged
him and whom he also loves. Similarly,
the dissolution of the first stanza’s arms
of iron into the unguarded body of the
final lines unsettles the poem’s decep-
tive conventionality. This is not, as it
may first appear, an account of mascu-
line aggression and feminine surrender
but rather an almost abstract render-
ing of the psychic rhythms of push and
pull. For what it’s worth, this sense that
we are dealing with emotions that are
at once embodied and in excess of any
The New York Review
 New for Spring
from NYU Press
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May 12, 2022 13

 individual is clearer in the Persian text,
since Farsi makes no grammatical dis-
tinction among the genders and uses
the same pronoun for all of them.
From Booker Prize winner
As Gray says in her introduction, Far-
Ben Okri rokhzad’s early, erotic work shocked
readers partly because so few women
ASTONISHING had written as she had, at least pub-
licly. However, it’s also true that what
the novelist Shahrnush Parsipur called
THE GODS Iran’s “limited ancestry” of female au-
thors is dominated by the authors of
love lyrics, especially in the premodern
period when longer narrative poetry
was considered an exclusively male
genre. Reading some of those earlier
writers—Rabe’eh, Mahsati, Jahan
Malek Khatun, and Mehri along with
the usual (male) suspects Rumi and
Hafiz—one can trace the same ser-
pentine structure of passive aggression
Farrokhzad masters in “Sin.” “How
long will you roll me around myself like
a scroll?” asks Jahan Khatun. “How
long will you twirl me in your hand like
a pen? . . . I became the dust of the roads
to sit on your robe./When will you stop
shaking me off your lap?”
This juxtaposition of emotional tur-
moil and quotidian detail is likewise
one of Farrokhzad’s favored tech-
niques, as in “Knot,” from her 1958
book Rebellion:
WITH A NEW
I saw the room confused, in
INTRODUCTION
disarray
BY THE your book fallen at my feet
my hairpins fallen
AUTHOR
there on your bed
No more sound of bubbling water
from the fish tank
What worries
kept your old cat awake?
Or take these lines from “Rose,”
which invokes only to disassemble the
eighteenth- century Scottish poet Rob-
ert Burns’s famous lyric “A Red, Red
Rose”:
ONE OF THE BBC’S
Red rose
“100 NOVELS Red rose
Red rose . . .
THAT SHAPED O paralyzed pigeons
O inexperienced menopausal
trees, O blind windows
OUR WORLD” a red rose is growing
red rose
red
like a flag in
“A modern-day classic.” an uprising
—Evening Standard Here, the focal image of the rose is
scattered among figures of everyday
distress and futility, which are unex-
“Amazing…
“Amazing pectedly usurped by the identification
of the rose with a flag, and of romantic
I think this is as close as you can get to reliving love with social unrest. Suddenly, the
the experience of a bedtime story.” —The Guardian air of stasis and rigidity—paralyzed
pigeons, menopausal trees, blind win-
dows—is dispersed and something new
“Beautiful. breaks free. It is as if the speaker of
this poem were walking through a gray,
A new creation myth.” lifeless city only to turn the corner and
run smack into a political demonstra-
—Daily Telegraph tion, with all its irresistible ambience
of forward momentum and hope. “Ah,
I am pregnant,” the poem ends, “preg-
nant, pregnant.”
These are, as Farrokhzad wanted
OTHER PRESS OTHERPRESS.COM them to be, anxious, angular poems,
as unorthodox when composed in tra-
ditional forms as when they skitter
across the page in free verse. “I am a
14
simple person,” she once said, “and
since a poem comes [to me] so natu-
rally, as naturally as my conversation,
this simplicity is reflected in the poem.”
By this she meant that, on the page, her
language and her sentiments possess
an authenticity and directness that is
served rather than diminished by for-
mal constraint. Gray’s translations are
accordingly honest and unassuming:
they never rhyme, are rarely alliter-
ative, and generally opt for the most
straightforward phrasing available.
Instead of dialing up the drama, they
allow Farrokhzad’s own uneasy tones
to be heard with new clarity, strength,
and a ferocious self-possession. This is
the voice of a person and a poet, not an
icon or ghost.
It’s not surprising that Farrokhzad’s
best-known poems are her sexiest, her
edgiest, her most doomed. These are
the poems that made her, and they’ll al-
ways appeal to those who can’t help but
imagine happiness as a zero-sum game:
it’s your well-being or mine, the cozy
nest or the wide- open sky. In the 1960s,
however, Farrokhzad became inter-
ested in finding other possibilities for
the clamorous subjectivity that dom-
inates her more popular earlier work.
The virtuosic, deeply strange “Some-
one Who Is Like No One” engages a
different poetic tradition, one that is
impersonal, prophetic, and subversive.
“I dreamed that someone is coming,”
she begins, someone who “can’t be ar-
rested/and handcuffed and thrown in
prison.” It turns out to be a messiah
suited uniquely to the present:
Someone is coming from
TnjpkhƗneh’s sky on the night of
the fireworks
and spreads out the picnic cloth
and distributes the bread
and distributes the Pepsis
and distributes MellƯ Park
and distributes the syrup for
whooping cough
and distributes the registration
days for school
and distributes the hospital
priority numbers
and distributes the rubber boots
and distributes tickets to FardƯn’s
movies
He distributes the dresses of
Seyyed JavƗd’s daughter
and distributes everything that is
left over
and also gives us our share
I dreamed . . .
This is a picture of revolution as an
affirmation of the ordinary, pinned
to the indefinite but wildly optimistic
notion of someone, a hypothesis who
nonetheless materializes in the incan-
tatory rhythms of the poem. Every-
day objects—cough medicine, movie
tickets, bread and boots and cans of
Pepsi—no longer carry the weight of
our resentments. Instead they become
the accessible enchantments of a just
world. Here, then, Farrokhzad begins
to imagine an existence in which our
needs and desires are not tragically at
cross-purposes, where love does not
threaten some inevitable amputation of
our capacities. The poem, in that sense,
raises an old question, perhaps the old-
est question there is for people who
want to live together: What can we do
so that we can do what we want? Hard
to say but not impossible. Q
The New York Review
 DAVID SMITH SCULPTURE
A Catalogue Raisonné, 1932–1965
I’m not sure I have ever seen a catalogue raisonné as beautiful, as magnificent, as the new publication
on the oeuvre of the great American sculptor David Smith. . . . Superb, with splendid photographs
and marvelously informative entries . . . In short, one of the handful of truly great sculptors of the
twentieth century has been given the scholarly monument that he deserves.
— Michael Fried, Bookforum

Left: Sketchbook 49, p. 83,

1964. Ink on paper, 8 ½ x 5 ½ in.
(21.6 x 14 cm). The Estate of
David Smith. Right: Cubi X, 1963.
Stainless steel, 121 ⅜ × 78 ¾ ×
24 in. (308.3 × 200 × 61.0 cm).
Inscribed on top of base: “David
Smith / April 4 ‘63 / Hi Rebecca,
Cubi X”. Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Robert O. Lord Fund
(717.1968)

Christopher Lyon, Editor

Susan J. Cooke, Research Editor
Forewords by Rebecca Smith and Candida Smith
Essays by Michael Brenson, Sarah Hamill,
Christopher Lyon, and Marc-Christian Roussel
Chronology by Tracee Ng

THE ESTATE OF DAVID SMITH

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

May 12, 2022 15

 What Are You Looking At?
Gawkers: Art and Audience
in Late Nineteenth- Century France
by Bridget Alsdorf.
Princeton University Press,
285 pp., $60.00
The flaneur was a familiar figure in
nineteenth- century Paris: a solitary,
quasi-artistic man (though not always)
who strolled the streets like an urban
epicure. A psychogeographer perhaps,
avant la lettre. Identified by Baudelaire
in his essay “The Painter of Modern
Life” (1863), he has become as essential
to our picture of that period as the demi-
mondaine, the fashionable café dansant,
the top hat, and the glass of absinthe.
It’s tempting to imagine tourists in the
first half of the Belle Epoque waiting
on boulevards to see one pass by with
cane, monocle, and superior expression.
The flaneur has also had an echoing af-
terlife: my first novel (Metroland, 1980)
featured two pretentious adolescents in
the London of 1963 who theorize that by
“lounging about in a suitably insouciant
fashion, but keeping an eye open all the
time, you could really catch life on the
hip—you could harvest all the aperçus
of the flâneur.” Their anachronistic
questing is only partially successful.
But there was another character on
the Paris street at that time, who had
already been there for centuries but
was less noticeable and less fashionable.
This was the badaud, or gawker: one
who stands and stares at anything going
on—a carriage accident, a fire brigade
in a hurry, a sudden police arrest, or a
suicide being fished from the river. If
the flaneur is an active idler, the badaud
is a stationary, passive one, ready to
stare open-mouthed at any phenome-
non that offers novelty or puzzlement.
The flaneur is of a higher social class, a
borderline artist, and a loner: you can-
not imagine a concatenation of flaneurs
eagerly exchanging observations. The
badaud, by contrast, is always liable to
form a group or crowd, either for a mass
gawk or some communal response. The
badaud is predominantly male, but
women are allowed to stop and stare and
mingle and gossip as well. Badauderie is
more democratic than flânerie: you need
no qualifications to indulge in it.
Badauds had history as well as num-
bers on their side. My five-volume
1882 Littré Dictionnaire de la langue
française has a mere four-line entry
for flâneur, with no mention of Baude-
laire but instead a single quote from
Charles de Bernard’s novel La Chasse
aux amants (1840). The entry also
is marked with a dagger, indicating
that the word had not qualified for
the Académie française’s dictionary.
The entry for badaud, by contrast, is
a good six inches long, offering quotes
from Corneille, Voltaire, Béranger,
and Régnier. (The earliest literary cita-
tion, at which Littré turned up its nose,
comes from 1534. Rabelais, in Gar-
gantua, judged Parisians “so stupid,
so badaud, so inherently inept,” that
the mildest diversion, like a juggler or
a mule with tinkling bells, would draw
an immediate hungry- eyed gathering.)
Most uses of the word are pejorative,
reassuring both writer and reader that
they are a cut above such ignorant and
probably illiterate street occupants.
16
Julian Barnes
Félix Vallotton: La Loge de théâtre, le monsieur et la dame, 1909
But these are not entirely passive
human beings: the usual synonym for
un badaud is un curieux, who may lack
the sophisticated investigative gaze of
the flaneur but is not entirely impervi-
ous to his surroundings.
Bridget Alsdorf’s Gawkers is about
the iconography of badauderie. It is a
rich, dense, wide-ranging survey whose
central figure is the Swiss artist Félix
Vallotton (1865–1925): “the foreign
Nabi,” as he was known in that short-
lived group that also contained Pierre
Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Mau-
rice Denis. Vallotton was the most
political of this largely apolitical move-
ment. When the Dreyfus Affair broke,
Vuillard, who was Vallotton’s closest
friend, wrote to him, “My heart races
when I read the newspapers and I try
not to let myself get sucked in all day.”
Vallotton’s response, on the other
hand, was to draw ferocious front-page
cartoons for the leftist, pro-Dreyfus
magazine Le Cri de Paris. One of them
shows the corpse of a naked woman
(representing Truth) being hoisted
dripping from a well, with the caption
“So that’s why she never came out”—
“that” being the fact that her torso is
transfixed by a French army officer’s
sword. In 1902 Vallotton produced
twenty-three prints for a special num-
ber of the anarcho-socialist journal
L’Assiette au beurre: here are thuggish
policemen, flagellating priests, fat and
furtive businessmen, sleek lawyers,
unjust employers, cruel schoolmasters,
and trigger-happy property owners.
In one image, a dozen policemen roar
down a street, sowing fear and con-
fusion, above the caption “Le jour de
Private Collection/Fondation Félix Vallotton, Lausanne
colors and textures, Vallotton is sharply
witty and satirical.
Nowhere is this shown more bril-
liantly than in the black-and-white
woodblock prints he did in the early
part of his career. It is an appealing
paradox that Vallotton loved to fill the
small space of a woodcut—often no
more than nine by thirteen inches—
with crowds of people, whereas his
paintings, generally much larger, are
populated sparsely, if at all. His crowds
are also often in movement: demonstra-
tors fleeing in panic, policemen—typi-
cally low-browed and loutish—slashing
away with batons and swords, passersby
being drawn in by a street huckster.
Deuxième Bureau contains thirty or
so people lining up for theater tickets,
each in a different attitude. In Le Coup
de vent a smaller group is caught in a
gust of wind, holding on to their hats
and to each other, while a little dog has
been lifted off the ground and spins
comically as if in a centrifuge. In L’Iv-
rogne a whirl of small children mock an
elderly drunk who has just come out of
a bar. You find yourself wondering how
Vallotton can get so many effects into
such a small space. Equally surprising
is his ability to convey such a range of
tonality using only black and white. In
Le Bon Marché (1893), female custom-
ers pore over bolts of fabric, and as with
Le Coup de vent, the viewer senses the
different textures of their outfits. You
can’t be sure if this is something Vallot-
ton has achieved or something he has
provoked the viewer into supplying, but
the effect is undeniable.
boire est arrivé.” Although, as Alsdorf Vallotton was, as Alsdorf puts it, “the
observes, “we have no written record of fin- de-siècle artist most fascinated by
his political views,” we certainly have a badauds as a social phenomenon with
clear graphic record of them. Vallotton deep relevance to art.” In L’Accident,
in these early years was of the anarcho- a zincograph of 1893, a horse and car-
left, like his friend the wit and art critic riage has just knocked a woman down
Félix Fénéon. Later, in a safe yet in- in the street, her basket spilling its con-
creasingly frustrated bourgeois mar- tents around the horse’s leading hoof.
riage, he longed to be more active. He Three men attempt to haul the animal
was appalled by the slaughter of World back, while the coachman pulls madly
War I and frustrated by his enforced in- on his reins. An adolescent girl comes
action; even the far-from-military Vuil- toward the incident; a mother and child
lard was sent to guard bridges. watch; two male figures stand on the
pavement; one, perhaps connected to
the woman and child, appears to have
Alsdorf’s book is timely: the past few just decided to ignore the incident; the
years have seen a resurgence in Vallot- other, his head cropped by the top of
ton’s reputation, which has long been oc- the print, seems to be in a dilemma,
cluded by those of Bonnard and Vuillard. his body turning backward as if he has
After his death it took nearly a century changed his mind and might possibly
for the Swiss artist to have his first major help, or at least carry on looking.
public exhibition in the Anglosphere, Of images like this, Alsdorf reports
shared between the Royal Academy in that “several writers have described
London (2019) and the Metropolitan the elevated perspective that Vallotton
Museum in New York (2019–2020). employs in his urban scenes as a mech-
His auction prices are rising fast. And anism of distance and omniscience,
the more he is shown, the more clearly a way for him to remove himself (and
he stands separate from his fellow Nabis. us) from the scene.” This seems over-
For all their overlap in color-block com- interpretative. If you show things from
position in the 1890s, Vallotton, before street level—as in Deuxième Bureau—
and after, was always pulling toward the you get a mass of overlapping bodies
hard- edged north rather than the soft- with the heads at more or less the same
edged south; he was more often a con- height. If you show things from an ele-
frontational artist than a seductive one. vated viewpoint, you cut out the over-
Like Vuillard and Bonnard, he painted lapping and can include more people
street scenes and domestic interiors. more clearly, enabling the construction
But Vallotton’s streets are full of social of a dynamic scene. Why should this in-
conflict, while his interiors may frame dicate a judicial indifference?
violently ambiguous emotional scenes.
He was an ideas man rather than a sen-
sualist; and where Vuillard and Bonnard T he concept of the badaud seems more
may be quietly humorous in their play of slippery and metamorphic the closer
The New York Review
 Martha Tuttle
The Colors of a Cholla Cactus After Rain in the Late Summer or Early Fall, 2022
Suite of three prints with found metal intaglio, woodblock, and pressure relief on Rives BFK
27 3/4 x 20 1/8 inches, 70.5 x 51.1 cm each
Edition of 20
Co-published by Farrington Press & Josh Pazda Hiram Butler

info@pazdabutler.com

May 12, 2022 17

you get to it. One moment all seems
clear, indeed nicely categorized: Louis
Huart’s Physiologie du flâneur (1841)
distinguishes the sophisticated flaneur
from lesser faux-flaneurs: the musard
(idler), the batteur de pavé (pavement
pounder), and then, lowest of all, the
badaud, who comes in two categories,
“simple” and “foreign” (presumably this
means Parisian versus out-of-towner).
But Alsdorf points out that a couple of
decades later Baudelaire, in his famous
essay, “does not mention badauds at all,
but he folds several of their distinguish-
ing features into his characterization
of the artist as ‘the perfect flâneur.’”
Gawking can be a permanent state of
mind shared by full-time street-corner
loungers; but there are part-time oppor-
tunists as well. Their social status is also
looser than as at first defined.
One of Alsdorf’s primary examples,
Jean-Léon Gérôme’s L’Accident (1901;
currently missing and available only
in a black-and-white print version), is
a fait divers in paint and print. Some-
thing has happened in a street: perhaps
someone has been stricken by illness,
accident, or drink—we can only guess,
because the fallen one is made invis-
ible by passersby leaning inward as
in a football huddle. In the buildings
above, onlookers fill the windows and
balconies (and have a better view of
the victim); a woman rushes toward
the huddle, while a policeman also
approaches with a leisurely gait—he
has seen it all before. It is a brilliant
image of gawking, but here the gawkers
are not those street- corner idlers pa-
tronized over the centuries but mostly
middle- class people going about their
business (even if that is only shopping).
Alsdorf’s scope in this beautifully
produced book is considerable: gawkers
appear not just on the streets of Paris,
gazing at accidents and incidents, at
usual and unusual behavior. They gawk
at theater bills, and then go inside the
theater and gawk at the action. When cin-
ema cameras appear on the boulevards,
the gawkers run up to them and gawk
into the lens, only to be reminded—in a
shrewd commercial moment—that the
processed film will shortly be showing at
a nearby cinema, whereupon the gawk-
ers pay to go in and gawk at themselves
gawking at the camera. At times there
seems to be an infinite regression of the
concept, and gawking becomes ubiqui-
tous to the point of meaninglessness.
Alsdorf’s excellent chapter on the
theater contains visual evidence from
Boilly to Daumier to Degas to Cassatt
to Vallotton (who only ever portrayed
the audience, never the stage) to Eugène
Carrière’s extraordinary Théâtre popu-
laire (1895): sixteen feet long by seven
feet high, all brown, gray, and ocher, with
scumbly white highlights, and an extra
reason to visit the Musée Rodin in Paris.
Maupassant wrote that the best place to
study crowds, and crowd behavior, and
the public display of passions was the
theater. (As actors frequently testify,
each audience is different.) Both Boilly
and Daumier show a group of specta-
tors on a “free performance” day, when
those who could not normally afford a
ticket were allowed entrance. Nowadays
we are all too familiar with our own im-
ages; less so back then. As Alsdorf aptly
remarks, Daumier “showed his audience
what they looked like when they look.”
Boilly is a bit snootier, Daumier more
generous and human. Here are people
who have probably never been to a play
before, but does this automatically make
18
them dumb gawkers, or just first-timers
not yet sure of the social rules? Some of
these theater scenes show attentive audi-
ences, others bored ones; but the latter
response could just be a properly criti-
cal one to a dull play. Crowds are always
composed of individuals; one window-
shopper might be an idle gawker, the
next a potential purchaser making his
or her considered choice. It’s not that
Alsdorf overstates her case; more that
this is a good book to argue with.
But this leads to a wider point of
artistic intention. When Vallotton
hewed his woodcuts, was his purpose
descriptive-satirical or prescriptive-
ethical? Alsdorf sides with those who
believe that he and others who por-
tray badauds are presenting us with an
“ethical dilemma.” Should we—and in-
deed would we—intervene or not when
‘The Accident’; photogravure by Manzi, Joyant, and Cie, after Jean-Léon Gérôme’s
painting of the same name, 1901
a carriage runs over a shopper? Are we
mere idle bystanders or citizens with
consciences? Or just, as Alsdorf puts
it, “armchair tourists of other people’s
tragedies”? Is the “message” of Vallot-
ton’s prints, as she proposes, that “with
witnessing comes responsibility”?
This seems to me excessive—and in-
deed a bit punitive. Perhaps someone
in 1893, looking at L’Accident, might
wonder what he or she would do if con-
fronted with similar circumstances.
(Though is there any evidence that they
did?) But in 2022? Do we really respond
to the print by wondering what we might
do if confronted by a car running over
a shopper? For a start, not by think-
ing, “Here is an ethical dilemma—how
should I behave?” Surely, in any case,
and in any age, we respond instinctively
(which is not to say unethically, rather
that the ethics are in the psychological
background, not forcefully present at
the time). We intervene, or not, almost
without thinking—though also, most
likely, by reaching for an iPhone and
(ethically, practically) calling the po-
lice, or (unethically) filming the scene
and putting it on social media. Such re-
sponses relate to the “bystander effect,”
also known as “bystander apathy,” a
concept posited by two social psychol-
ogists in 1968, according to which “the
number of bystanders around a victim
is in inverse relationship to each by-
stander’s impulse to help.”
Alsdorf is an admirable close reader
of images, clever at picking out, in a
mass of bodies, a tiny figure who is doing
nothing more than staring back at us, as floorwalker are bent over the same ob-
if, across the centuries, he has spotted ject, which could be a perfume bottle
us gawking at him and is gawking back. or possibly a lipstick; it happens to be
Her considerable attention to Vallot- pinky-brown, so, as has been suggested,
ton peaks in a powerful account of the there may be a penile innuendo here.
painting Le Bon Marché (as opposed to Either way, the couple are engaged in
the print). This is considered by many sealing a deal that will give satisfaction
to be Vallotton’s greatest painting. Cre- to both. And whereas in Vallotton’s se-
ated in 1898, it was the star of his Lon- ries of Intimités, the men are usually in
don and New York shows, though it has charge, caught in a persuasive posture
now returned to private hands. It is his (sometimes with the implication, or ac-
only triptych (an occasional form for tual sight, of a bed in the background),
the Nabis—Denis did one in praise of here the women are in charge. True,
domestic bliss, Bonnard several). In a that salesman is doing his oily best to
traditional religious altarpiece the outer conclude the sale, but it is the woman
panels would direct our focus toward who has the money, and therefore the
the central image, while the scale is nor- power. And the purpose of it all, as Zo-
mally constant across the three panels. la’s title ironically reminds us, is “wom-
The Nabis acknowledge this precedent en’s happiness.”
while dismantling it. Outer panels still But the painting is also about more
relate to the central one, but both scale than this. In 1880, Zola had written an
essay on money and literature in which,
B. Fontanel/Mairie de Bordeaux/Collection Musée Goupil, Bordeaux
Alsdorf writes, he “defended modern
capitalism as a liberator of the arts, ar-
guing that money emancipates artists
and their work from ‘humiliating pa-
tronage.’” This was true, though more
for some than others, and the emancipa-
tion was never straightforward; many of
Zola’s literary friends did not fail to note
his patent (and to some, vulgar) delight
in the money and the goods it bought.
Artists, as Alsdorf points out, were often
more ambivalent about this exchange of
master from the patron to the market.
New forms of mechanical reproduction
made their work cheaper and more ubiq-
uitous: the rise in the print and poster
markets, plus the new range of illus-
trated newspapers and magazines, pro-
vided great opportunities. But what if
this sudden new market was as quixotic
as an old patron could have been? Does
the unfettered market rub away not just
at the artist’s sensibility but also at his or
her soul? The real-life Bon Marché de-
partment store contained a picture gal-
and focus can be separate from it: the lery designed to imitate the Louvre, but
largest figure—as in Le Bon Marché— the paintings on display were for sale just
may well be in a side panel. as straightforwardly as bolts of cloth and
Thadée Natanson called Vallotton’s suggestive lipsticks were on other floors.
Intimités woodcuts “stations of senti- As Alsdorf concludes, the “deflation of
mental life,” i.e., a secular version of art into commodity is precisely what
the Stations of the Cross; in Le Bon Vallotton’s triptych is about.”
Marché, as Alsdorf puts it, “religious In the same year, 1898, Vallotton
devotion is a shadow structure for the painted Misia à sa coiffeuse (Misia
corruption of modern life.” Its cen- at Her Dressing Table), in which the
tral panel has a crowd of shoppers on pink- clad, Roman-nosed Parisian so-
a curved stairway, descending into cialite and tastemaker Misia Natanson
the heaven (or hell) of consumerism. stands in front of a mirror with the tools
The left-hand panel has an apparently of beautification lying in front of her,
submissive salesman in intimate con- doing a final primp before launching
versation with a female customer; the herself into some social event. On the
right-hand one has a single female fig- wall behind her is a tiny black-and-white
ure with her back to us and facing an print, clearly by Vallotton, though not
oncoming crowd of customers, as if she immediately identifiable, so perhaps
has completed the purchases they are made deliberately generic by the artist.
now pantingly heading toward. The This detail might be sly or mocking,
outer extremities of the side panels self-promoting or self-punitive; Als-
show counters with brightly colored dorf, I think rightly, takes it as a sign
boxes of wares; those on the left display of Vallotton’s fear that art has or could
prices, those on the right announce become a “bourgeois accessory.” It is as
REDUCED and SALE . Fifteen years if the real creator of beauty, and the real
earlier, Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des expression of it, in this painting is the
dames had described the department formidable Misia herself.
store as “the cathedral of commerce”; Vallotton, never as sunny a charac-
Vallotton’s painting is a response and ter as Vuillard and Bonnard, was much
endorsement. Here elegant, behatted given to melancholy and self-reproach.
women pursue goodies where their pic- Ten years before his death, with an
torial ancestors had pursued the Good. awareness that his career was in de-
As Alsdorf notes, the painting is “a cline, he described himself as “one who
hinge” between two main strands of watches life from behind a window in-
Vallotton’s work up to this date: flow- stead of living.” Perhaps the man who
ing crowd scenes in a compressed space in his art had portrayed gawkers in all
and portrayals of couples caught in their open-mouthed, quizzical vacancy
often ambiguous, possibly presexual feared that in the end he, as an art-
engagements. In the left-hand panel of ist, was not much more than a gawker
Le Bon Marché, the customer and the himself. Q
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May 12, 2022 19

 Burkina Faso’s Master Builder
The courtyard of Kéré Architecture’s Léo Doctors’ Housing, 2019, at the Surgical Clinic and Health Center, Léo, Burkina Faso
Momentum of Light
by Iwan Baan and Francis Kéré.
Zurich: Lars Müller,
177 pp.,
75.00 (paper)
1.
Since its creation in 1979, the annual
Pritzker Architecture Prize—the high-
est tribute bestowed on living practi-
tioners of the building art, likened to
the Nobel Prize in other disciplines—
has undergone a number of identity
changes. None has been consistent or
permanent, and none has diminished
its prestige or, perhaps more impor-
tantly to the winners, its monetary ben-
efits. Those (apart from the $100,000
check that has accompanied it from the
beginning) come from the guarantee of
commissions that the accolade brings
them for the remainder of their careers,
not least because the short lists for sev-
eral major construction projects have
been limited to Pritzker recipients. For
example, the 2003 competition held by
the United Nations Development Cor-
poration for a new office tower south of
the UN’s landmark Secretariat build-
ing in New York City was thus circum-
scribed, and the job went to Fumihiko
Maki, the 1993 Pritzker laureate. This
restriction may betray a want of imag-
ination among uninformed or insecure
clients, but the financial risks involved
in large-scale construction are so wor-
risome that recourse to architects with
the Pritzker’s imprimatur is an under-
standable precaution.
At first it seemed destined to be a
lifetime achievement award. The ini-
tial honoree was Philip Johnson, who
turned seventy-three in 1979 and was
thought to best exemplify the Olympian
stature the prize intended to affirm. In
retrospect, if it were instituted today, the
choice of this inveterate shape-shifter,
who was of undeniable historical im-
portance because of his early advocacy
of modern architecture but whose work
was always extremely derivative (and
leaving aside his having been an ardent
20
Martin Filler
fascist), would be less certain. Johnson
was immediately followed by the far
more deserving Luis Barragán, the re-
clusive seventy- eight-year- old Mexican
Minimalist whose monumental yet in-
timate architecture, previously known
only to specialists, had been the subject
of a revelatory Museum of Modern Art
retrospective in 1976.
Next in line were a number of
younger architects whose selection
indicated a desire for the Pritzker to
be more in touch with current devel-
opments, such as Richard Meier, who
was designated in 1984, shortly before
he turned fifty, and then won the cov-
eted commission for the Getty Center
in Los Angeles. But from time to time
several long- overlooked old masters
have been retrieved from architectural
history and given one final victory
lap: the Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer in
1988, the Danish Jørn Utzon in 2003,
the German Frei Otto in 2015, the In-
dian Balkrishna Doshi in 2018, and the
Japanese Arata Isozaki in 2019, all of
whom were in their eighties or nineties
at the time. Niemeyer and Doshi fur-
ther enhanced the geographic diver-
sity of an award that has been heavily
skewed toward Europe (twenty-three
winners thus far), followed by the US
(eight) and Japan (seven).
T he only continent (apart from
Antarctica) that had not yet been
represented was Africa, an omis-
sion remedied with the surprising an-
nouncement in March of this year’s
laureate, the fifty-seven-year- old Fran-
cis Kéré, who is also the first Black
architect to win the Pritzker. He was
born in Burkina Faso, the landlocked
West African nation of some 21 mil-
lion inhabitants that is bounded on the
east by Niger, on the south by Benin,
Togo, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast, and
on the west and north by Mali. Slightly
larger than Colorado, it was colonized
by France in the last decade of the
nineteenth century, gained its indepen-
dence in 1960, and was known as Upper
Jaime Herraiz/Kéré Architecture
out the Islamic world. Kéré was sin-
gled out for his first executed work,
the Gando Primary School of 2001 in
the village of his birth. This low- cost
project’s material modesty, combined
with its functional logic, attentiveness
to environmental conditions, and a
beauty both specific to its place and yet
geographically transcendent, instantly
convinced me of his uncommon talent.
My wife, the architectural historian
Rosemarie Haag Bletter, and I traveled
to India for the Aga Khan Award festiv-
ities at which Kéré was to be honored.
The proceedings began in New Delhi,
after which the honorees and dozens of
guests were to fly to Agra for the culmi-
nating events, but due to a heavy fog our
flight was delayed for several hours. As
we milled around the airport’s VIP de-
parture lounge, we introduced ourselves
to Kéré, who in his presentation of his
award-winning project had touched us
deeply with his eloquence, sincerity, and
unabashed commitment to social issues,
a concern all too rare in architecture
today. He apologized for his English—
which was flawless—and explained that
because he had been living in Berlin for
almost twenty years he was much more
Volta until 1984, when after a military fluent in German. Thereupon Rosema-
coup it was renamed Burkina Faso, rie, who was born near Stuttgart, seam-
which translates roughly as “country lessly switched to her Muttersprache
of incorruptible people.” Not since the and the two chatted away for the rest
emergence around the turn of the mil- of our wait.
lennium of Kéré’s one-year-younger Ever since that memorable encounter
contemporary the Ghanaian-British I’ve monitored Kéré’s development with
David Adjaye, whose major works in- close interest. I’ve also feared that my
clude the National Museum of Afri- initial enthusiasm might wane, as can
can American History and Culture of happen when promising young archi-
2009–2016 in Washington, D.C., has an tects get off to a fast start and then pro-
African master builder burst onto the duce more and more work that suffers
world stage. from the myriad financial constraints,
The Pritzker’s periodic shifts in bureaucratic obstacles, and circumstan-
emphasis have reflected the chang- tial disappointments—to say nothing
ing composition of its jury, which now of the temptations and corruptions of
comprises a chair and eight members fame and fortune—that even the most
(a mix of former prizewinners, other idealistic practitioners of this constantly
architects, educators, curators, critics, compromised art form must face. But
and architecture buffs such as US Su- Kéré’s relatively small yet wholly orig-
preme Court Justice Stephen Breyer), inal and remarkably cohesive body of
whose terms are staggered to encour- work—fewer than forty buildings exe-
age both continuity and change. The cuted thus far, a number sure to increase
present chair is the Chilean architect rapidly now—instills a feeling of enor-
Alejandro Aravena, who received the mous optimism about the uplifting new
accolade in 2016, four years before direction he opens in the building art for
he was chosen to head the jury, when his people in particular and the world at
the announcement praised “his com- large.
mitment to society, resulting in works
and activism that respond to social, hu-
manitarian, and economic needs.” The
same could be said of Kéré, who might 2.
thus have been just the kind of candi- Diébédo Francis Kéré was born in
date Aravena favored for the Pritzker, 1965 in Gando, a small community in
and I reacted to the news of Kéré’s the southeast of what was still called
recognition with unalloyed joy. The Upper Volta, the oldest son of the
Pritzker Prize medallion and honorar- village chief. As the first-born male,
ium will be presented to him at a cere- Diébédo—who now goes by his middle
mony on May 27 at the London School name—was expected to learn how to
of Economics’ Marshall Building of read and write in order to handle his
2016–2022, designed by the Dublin- father’s correspondence. Because there
based firm Grafton Architects, whose was no school in Gando, at age seven
principals, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley he was sent to live with an uncle in the
McNamara, are the 2020 laureates. nearby city of Tenkodogo where he
I first met Kéré eighteen years ago, at could be given a basic education. The
the very outset of his building career, boy turned out to be talented, and after
when he was among the winners of the he finished his primary schooling he
Aga Khan Award for Architecture. It learned the useful trade of carpentry.
was inaugurated, two years before the He showed such aptitude that in 1985
Pritzker, by Prince Karim Aga Khan he was given a scholarship to study
IV, the spiritual leader of the world- wood craftsmanship in West Ger-
wide Nizari Ismaili Shia community, to many by the government-sponsored
encourage better architecture through- Carl Duisberg Society. That nonprofit
The New York Review
organization was founded in 1949 and
specialized in outreach programs for
young people from developing nations,
part of the country’s postwar effort to
make amends for its recent past. (It was
named after a chemist and industrial-
ist who was CEO of the pharmaceutical
giant Bayer, which during the Weimar
Republic merged with several other
firms to become IG Farben. Duisberg
died in 1935, after which Farben be-
came infamous for its production of
Zyklon B, a gas used in the Nazi exter-
mination camps during the Holocaust.)
Kéré’s vocational training in Germany
inspired him to remain there after its
reunification and study architecture,
which he saw as the best way he could
serve the people of his homeland.
In 1995 he won a scholarship to the
Technical University in Berlin. In a
2020 interview with the online maga-
zine Pin- Up, Kéré recalled, “When you
study in Berlin, you will face the great
Mies van der Rohe” (whose most con-
spicuous work in the German capital,
his Neue Nationalgalerie of 1961–1968,
reopened last August after a six-year
renovation by the British architect
David Chipperfield). “I really like the
art of rationalism he applied—so ef-
ficient, so simple, very clear to under-
stand.” Another formative influence
was Louis Kahn, whose work in the
Third World, especially his Indian In-
stitute of Management of 1962–1974 in
Ahmedabad, Kéré visited and found to
be “an eyeopener. Kahn’s adaptation
to the place, the use of brick, the sim-
plicity—but then the complexity, at the
same time.”
Although late-phase Mies schemes
such as the Neue Nationalgalerie—a
BOLD NEW ART BOOKS
The arc and continued
ascent of contemporary
artist Beverly McIver.
May 12, 2022
steel-girdered, glass-walled Minimalist
box perched atop a broader travertine
podium—might seem the antithesis of
the humble, environmentally respon-
sive architecture Kéré aimed to cre-
ate in Burkina Faso, that old master’s
emphasis on structural integrity and
elimination of the unnecessary spoke
directly to him. During the 1920s, even
as Mies envisioned structures unprec-
edented in their extensive use of plate
glass, he also created a remarkable
series of houses in Germany that de-
ployed brick in such a modern way that
decades later Kéré understood its ap-
plicability to Burkina Faso, where he
would use locally fabricated brick, as-
sembled with a Miesian attention to ex-
acting detail and clean craftsmanship,
to make his breakthrough works.
During his architectural studies
in Berlin, Kéré started a charitable
foundation called Schulbausteine für
Gando (school-building blocks for
Gando) to raise money for a school of
his own design in his home village. He
has said:
Good architecture in Burkina
Faso is a classroom where you
can sit, have light that is filtered,
entering the way that you want to
use it, across a blackboard or on a
desk. How can we take away the
heat coming from the sun, but use
the light to our benefit? Creating
climate conditions to give basic
comfort allows for true teaching,
learning and excitement. I consid-
ered my work a private task, a duty
to this community.
The social and cultural
roots—and global
importance—of iconic
Filipino American artist
and educator Carlos Villa’s
artwork and career.
In his plans for the Gando Primary
School, Kéré specified low-tech com-
ponents and fabrication methods that
would allow untrained locals to be en-
listed in its construction. However, he
saw no reason not to aim for an innova-
tive design unlike anything its builders
had ever seen before. For example, the
single-story structure’s outer walls are
made of hybrid bricks he devised with
a small percentage of concrete added
to the usual clay for extra durability. To
increase indoor air circulation in that
hot, arid climate, he lifted the curving
roof up above the walls on a dense net-
work of angled supports made from
common rebar—the steel reinforce-
ment bars embedded in poured con-
crete to give it more strength—which
Gando residents were taught to weld
into the required angular groupings.
The school served as Kéré’s diploma
project at the Technical University
and led to commissions for other edu-
cational institutions in Burkina Faso,
including two extensions, a library,
and teachers’ housing for the Gando
Primary School; the Dano Secondary
School of 2006–2007; and the Lycée
Schorge Secondary School of 2014–
2016 in Koudougou. The latter is a
beautifully proportioned composition
of nine tall minimalist modules topped
by ventilating towers clad in a local red
stone and conjoined in a horseshoe ar-
rangement around an inner courtyard,
with the outer perimeter of the group-
ing wrapped in a tall, semitransparent
screen of slightly angled eucalyptus
rods.
The Lycée Schorge’s configuration of
small individual pavilions enclosing a
central plaza works well in West Africa,
“Returns to the topic
of art’s relationship to
capitalism in the 1960s
to uncover things most
scholars have preferred to
ignore.”
—Joshua Shannon,
author of The Recording
Machine
www.ucpress.edu
where a semi- enclosed open-air space
with peripheries shaded from the re-
lentless sunlight can provide a sense of
protection desirable for social welfare
facilities in a part of the world where
too few of them exist. Kéré went on to
use similar layouts for two projects in
the Burkinabé town of Léo: the Surgi-
cal Clinic and Health Center of 2014
and the Léo Doctors’ Housing of 2019,
which added on-site residences for the
medical staff. The ensemble is among
Kéré’s strongest compositions—an arc
of cubic, self- contained dwelling units
made from a double wall of concrete
block and compressed- earth blocks
(CEB) that increase thermal mass to
keep the interiors cool. The modules
were given a coating of tinted plaster
to stabilize the CEB, in a color much
like the iron-rich red earth of the sur-
rounding terrain, which makes the
architecture seem more like a natural
emanation of the landscape rather than
a man-made imposition.
Other African countries have picked
up on Kéré’s feel for place and appro-
priateness, and his built works else-
where on the continent have been
excellent without exception. These in-
clude a visitors’ center for the National
Park of Mali in Bamako, completed in
2010; the Benga Riverside School of
2017–2018 in Tete, Mozambique; and,
most recently, the Startup Lions Cam-
pus of 2019–2021 in Turkana County,
Kenya. His sole completed commis-
sion in the US to date is his Xylem of
2019, an intriguingly conceived and
crafted shelter at the Tippet Rise Art
Center in Fishtail, Montana, a privately
sponsored cultural venue that features
a number of outdoor sculptures and
When Diego Rivera
helped forge Mexican
national identity in visual
terms and imagined a
shared American future.
21
structures by artists such as Alexander
Calder and Mark di Suvero.
Kéré’s contribution is a freestand-
ing circular gazebo made from pine
logs harvested from surrounding for-
ests in a “natural pruning” to promote
the health of the remaining trees. The
structure’s name refers to the pattern
created by its roof, which is sixty feet in
diameter and assembled from slices of
pine log that when viewed from above
recall xylems, the circular bundles of
vascular tissue that conduct water up-
ward through the stems of growing
plants. There is a fitting symmetry in
Kéré having fulfilled this commission,
because the construction of his Naaba
Belem Goumma Secondary School
in Gando, begun in 2011, is being un-
derwritten by the Tippet Rise Fund of
the Sydney F. Frank Foundation, es-
tablished by the art center’s founders,
Peter and Cathy Frank Halstead.
3.
Because most of Kéré’s completed
buildings are far from the well-trodden
pathways of mass tourism, few peo-
ple have seen them apart from their
users, local residents, or architecture
aficionados who’ve traveled great dis-
tances expressly to visit them. Hap-
pily, among the latter is Iwan Baan,
the Dutch architectural photographer
who is renowned for his uncanny abil-
ity to capture a building’s setting with
extraordinary fidelity while at the same
time making pictures that are fully
descriptive of its materials, massing,
and details. His incisive depictions of
Kéré’s work are among the best we
“We love love love our Vitsœ system.
The build quality and easiness of
assembly is amazing, but it was
your service that made the whole
process such a joy.”
‘Love’ is a word we hear a lot at
Vitsœ. Other verbs just don’t seem to
cut it. Like in this heartfelt message
from Melvin in Sydney, Australia to
his personal Vitsœ planner Sophie in
London, England.
As with any customer, Sophie ensured
that every detail was considered so
that Melvin’s shelving was perfect for
his needs.
Like everybody at Vitsœ, she’s
passionate about good service, and
communicates with all her customers
22
have, and the exceptional affinity the
two artists share led to their collabora-
tion on Momentum of Light, a poetic
visual essay on the traditional architec-
ture of Burkina Faso and, by extension,
the influence it has exerted on the artis-
tic development of its foremost contem-
porary master builder. Baan’s highly
atmospheric pictures of the country’s
hand-formed mud structures, some
of which are painted or incised with
powerful graphic patterns, convey an
almost palpable impression of his pres-
ence on the scene, as do Kéré’s reminis-
cences of the effect such structures had
on defining his own architecture:
The quality of light lies in the in-
terplay of dark and bright. Having
only one or the other means losing
some of the intricate beauty their
communion can provide, making
space and the experience within
as rich as can be. Never yield the
power of light solely to a switch.
In the immediate aftermath of the
Third World’s emergence from colo-
nial rule during the second half of the
twentieth century, several recently in-
dependent nations turned to Western
architects to design new governmental
centers, most famously Le Corbusier’s
new state capital of Chandigarh for the
Indian state of Punjab (1951–1964) and
Louis Kahn’s Sher- e-Bangla Nagar,
the national capitol building in Dhaka,
Bangladesh (1962–1983). In due course
it became more common for native-
born architects to get the commissions
for such defining expressions of liber-
ated nationhood, as exemplified by Sri
Lanka’s New Parliament Complex in
Photo by
Melvin T
directly, wherever they are in the world.
Whether in-person, or on the other side
of the globe, our planners hold your
hand throughout the whole process.
Time and again we prove that long-
distance relationships really do work.
Be it planning your first system, moving
it to a new home or adding an extra
shelf, every single interaction is handled
with love, from Vitsœ…
Design Dieter Rams
Founded 1959
vitsoe.com
Kotte (1979–1982) by Geoffrey Bawa,
and Charles Correa’s Vidhan Bha-
van, the Madhya Pradesh legislative
assembly building in Bhopal, India
(1980–1996). Both those schemes draw
on regional forms quite different from
Le Corbusier’s and Kahn’s more sculp-
turally abstract Modernist approaches
at Chandigarh and Dhaka, which none-
theless rank among their designers’ fin-
est late works.
Kéré has gotten two such governmen-
tal commissions thus far. In 2015 he was
asked to design a new National Assem-
bly building for Burkina Faso’s capital
city Ouagadougou to replace the one
that was burned down a year earlier
during an uprising that ousted Blaise
Compaoré, the country’s chief of state
for nearly three decades, who wanted
to make himself president for life.1 The
architect’s unconventional project re-
flects his determination to “think of
how to design a [new parliament build-
ing] that responds to Burkina Faso and
the needs of the people.”
To avoid making it seem like an un-
approachable seat of power, he devised
a six-story, ziggurat-like structure with
gently gradated and intermittently
landscaped slopes that will allow its
exterior to be used in much the same
way as Snøhetta’s Norwegian National
Opera and Ballet of 2002–2008 in Oslo,
one of the most popular public spaces
created in postmillennial Europe.
The success of Snøhetta’s scheme de-
rives largely from the sloping roof that
melds into the plazas that surround the
building and serves as a veritable grand-
stand where locals and tourists delight
in seeing and being seen. Whether or
not climatic conditions will allow Kéré’s
equivalent in Ouagadougou to be used
in quite the same way remains to be
seen—its realization has been delayed.
But the public access that the fore-
most Burkinabé architect builds into
his country’s new parliament building
could not speak more distinctly of the
democratic and participatory values he
hopes his architecture will foster there.
Farther along is his Benin National
Assembly of 2019–2023 in Porto-Novo,
the capital city of the country formerly
called Dahomey, just to the south of
Burkina Faso. Kéré’s scheme was in-
spired by the West African tradition of
the palaver tree—normally some huge,
broadly canopied tree such as a baobab,
in the cooling shade of which tribal rep-
resentatives would meet to discuss issues
of mutual importance. “Palaver,” which
is related to the Portuguese palavra
(word), in American usage means “idle
jabber” and in British has a more pejora-
tive sense of bothersome complications.
But in the eighteenth century it denoted
negotiations between indigenous people
and traders, and in Africa today it sig-
nifies parliamentary cooperation.
This 376,000-square-foot building
is sited in a public park planted with
Benin’s native flora and evokes the
protective profile of a gigantic baobab.
A four-story, square, flat-roofed office
superstructure is lifted on thin periph-
eral columns and shades a deep wrap-
around arcade centered with a hollow
concrete “tree trunk” surrounded by
upwardly flaring supports, all of which
reinforce the arboreal imagery without
descending into mimetic kitsch. On the
ground floor is the parliament’s assem-
1
See Howard French, “Enemies of
Progress,” The New York Review, Oc-
tober 7, 2021.
bly hall, a lofty ovoid space of admira-
ble simplicity, with curved structural
beams that also vaguely suggest shel-
tering tree branches. The chamber’s
pale earth tones and lack of showy na-
tionalistic iconography convey both im-
mense dignity and calm self-assurance.
In 2010, I was asked by Vanity Fair mag-
azine’s editor, Graydon Carter, to partic-
ipate in a poll of architectural experts to
determine “the most important piece of
architecture since 1980.” I immediately
regarded this as a tiresome journalistic
stunt that would reduce a serious issue
to a cartoonish popularity contest. Fur-
thermore, mindful of the unanimous
critical acclaim that greeted Frank Geh-
ry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in
Spain when it opened in 1997 and cat-
apulted its architect to dizzying heights
of international fame, the survey’s result
seemed as preordained as that of a presi-
dential election in Putin’s Russia.
Nonetheless, I responded with a letter
naming Kéré’s Gando Primary School.
I explained that “important” can have
a wide variety of meanings, but that in
my opinion establishing the first school
in a desperately poor Third World vil-
lage, and with a superlative example of
innovative sustainable building design
at that, seemed a far more important
accomplishment than almost anything
else I could think of in contemporary
architecture. Needless to say, Gehry
swept the Vanity Fair competition, with
twenty-eight of the fifty-two ballots cast
for his Spanish masterpiece. (Renzo Pi-
ano’s High Tech–Minimalist Menil Col-
lection in Houston came in second, with
ten votes.) I was the sole participant to
cite Kéré, which I felt was likely regarded
by the magazine staff as a write-in pro-
test. In fact, a tally of all the respondents
listed my choice as “(none).”
Since 2017, Kéré has served as chair
of architecture at Munich’s Technical
University, though his professional of-
fice remains in Berlin. (The TU Archi-
tecture Museum’s excellent 2016–2017
exhibition of the first fifteen years of his
building career was accompanied by
an equally fine catalog, Francis Kéré:
Radically Simple.2) He holds dual cit-
izenship in Germany and Burkina Faso
and divides his time as much as pos-
sible between his native and adoptive
countries, while also having accepted
several of the visiting professorships at
prestigious schools—in his case Har-
vard, Yale, and Germany’s Bauhaus
University in Weimar—that come as
further proof of rising stardom on the
international architectural scene.
But his emotional and moral attach-
ment to his humble roots remains strong,
and although one has seen other gifted
architects morph from self-effacing as-
pirants into egomaniacal divas, it seems
to me improbable that his head will be
turned by the tidal wave of adulation
that the Pritzker Prize inevitably un-
leashes. How judiciously he picks and
chooses among the many offers that
will now come his way—including such
typical Pritzker-winner bait as condos
in New York’s Chelsea and Miami’s
Brickell districts, boutiques for LVMH
luxury brands, and wineries for tech
billionaires—will indicate how well
Francis Kéré can handle the double-
edged sword that is architectural fame
in our money-worshiping, celebrity-
besotted modern world. Q
2
Hatje Cantz, 2016.
The New York Review
 ‘Anxious for a Mayf lower’
A Nation of Descendants:
Politics and the Practice of
Genealogy in US History
by Francesca Morgan.
University of North Carolina Press,
301 pp., $95.00; $29.95 (paper)
Con artists are having a moment. The
latest crop features Elizabeth Holmes,
the deep-voiced, unblinking leader of the
fraudulent blood-testing start-up Ther-
anos, one of many cheats now starring
in books, podcasts, and dramatic tele-
vision serials, as if they had accom-
plished something.
Perhaps they have. Like Gatsby,
Holmes invented her celebrity and
fortune out of virtually nothing: a
smile, a wide and worshipful gaze,
and genealogy. A Cincinnati hospital
had been named for her great-great-
grandfather, a doctor who married into
the Fleischmann yeast fortune. One of
Holmes’s earliest investors, initially du-
bious of a young woman who dropped
out of college after a year, was im-
pressed by her family history of success
in business and medicine, apparently
believing such expertise was magically
transferrable across generations.
Genealogy, it turns out, has played
a rich subterranean part in building
improbable expectations, according
to Francesca Morgan’s recent book, A
Nation of Descendants: Politics and
the Practice of Genealogy in US His-
tory. Probing the origins of American
genealogy, she finds that, from our
earliest years, it has been inflating our
most grandiose fantasies. While it has
served for some peoples—notably Af-
rican Americans—as a means of recov-
ering their history, finding a sense of
belonging, and expanding the country’s
social acceptance of once- despised mi-
norities, it has acted at the same time
as a tool of exclusion, promoting white
supremacy, the Lost Cause, and eugen-
ics. She quotes one “despairing profes-
sional” lamenting that “P.T. Barnum
missed his calling when he neglected to
become a genealogist.”
Yet despite our long fascination with
family history, outsiders have also
picked up on an American ambiva-
lence toward it. Alexis de Tocqueville,
as Morgan notes, was initially charmed
by our democratic equality, with fami-
lies emerging “constantly out of noth-
ing, while others constantly fall back
into nothing.” The longer he observed
us, however, the more he was struck by
the fact that, even while repudiating
rank and class, the average American
was “secretly distressed” about his po-
sition in society. Every other yahoo, or
so it appeared, yearned to establish a
connection to “the first settlers of the
colonies,” whose descendants seemed
to the French aristocrat suspiciously
thick on the ground.
In the United States, genealogy be-
came a means of constructing a narra-
tive around identity, elevating oneself
from the rabble by finding links to
whatever passed for royalty in the blank
void of the New World: prominent
early colonists, soldiers who fought in
the Revolution, the Founding Fathers.
Not that aristocracy was forgotten.
May 12, 2022
Caroline Fraser
Photographs from W. E. B. Du Bois’s monthly, The Crisis, October 1916
John Bernard Burke, whose Burke’s
Peerage, founded by his father in 1826,
became the great European guide to
inbreeding, profited off the pre–Civil
War vogue for heraldry among Amer-
icans willing to pay to prove a con-
nection to the finer English families
(no other nationality had the requisite
cachet), preferably those with crests,
which, though legally meaningless in
this country, could be displayed “on
their walls, on bookplates and other
similar items of property, or in jewelry
or cufflinks on their person.” Even su-
perficial relatedness was prized. Mor-
gan quotes Emerson ravished by “the
fair complexion, blue eyes and open
and florid aspects” of the English face.
Elsewhere, the Sage of Concord sighed
with regret over the lower order of la-
borers: “German & Irish nations, like
the Negro, have a deal of guano in their
destiny.” Such notions of hereditary
greatness, beloved by eugenicists, con-
gealed into the pseudoscientific foun-
dation of white Christian supremacy.
It was during the Gilded Age, as
American society became increasingly
status- conscious and stratified, that
genealogy experienced its first explo-
sive rise. “Genealogy. . . joined manners,
dress, foodways, and home furnish-
ings in the toolboxes of Americans
who wished to rise in society,” Mor-
gan writes. Hereditary organizations
were founded, often by and for women,
largely white women (with a few im-
portant exceptions), a movement that
eventually contributed to the rise of
women’s social and political clubs gen-
erally. Morgan quotes a letter from a
Boston genealogist describing a female
client in Wahpeton, North Dakota,
who was, as so many were, “anxious
for a Mayflower.” The Daughters of the
American Revolution (DAR), founded
in 1890, was typical of such groups,
allowing women barred from most
professions to hold meetings, study
history, and attain research skills that
were potentially marketable. Although
the Sons of the Revolution (SAR) was
founded first, in 1889, the appeal to
women was such that soon Daughters
of the Revolution and Colonial Dames
of America “far outnumbered Sons.”
A preponderance of women in the
field gave rise, Morgan writes, to the
stock character of the “chatty old lady,”
the grandmother or spinster aunt who
devoted her spare time and emotional
energies to the collection and organiza-
tion of family lore, sometimes dubbed
“memory work” or “kin work.” As
soon as family trees were seen as a
form of female embroidery, kin work
was derided as “unmanly,” encourag-
ing a split between serious academic
studies and genealogy, which was often
based not on textual documentation
but on names written in family Bibles,
oral history, or stories passed down for
generations. Thus genealogy became
history’s redheaded—and relentlessly
feminized—stepchild.
It also became a favorite device of
white supremacists. “Hereditary or-
ganizations and the institutions that
served them, such as libraries and his-
torical societies,” Morgan argues, “ex-
panded whiteness and Americanism”
in a host of ways. She describes the
practice by the DAR and other groups
of installing plaques on boulders or
walls preserving the names and birth-
dates of the first white babies born in
a given locale, a weird corollary to the
Confederate monuments that sprang
up in the early years of the twentieth
century.
During an era when Teddy Roosevelt
and other nationalists feared that white
Anglo- Saxons, whose birth rates ap-
pear to have lagged during the 1800s,
were committing “race suicide,” hered-
itary organizations devoted themselves
to policing racial purity. The DAR
banned “colored” women by statute in
1894, the same year as the founding of
the United Daughters of the Confed-
eracy, a group that, as Morgan dryly
notes, “hardly needed a stated ban.”
The DAR’s “lineage books” document-
ing members’ white pedigree (it pro-
duced 160 volumes between 1895 and
1938) were used in protecting against
slurs and rumors. When Warren G.
Harding ran for president in 1920,
Republicans cited his SAR member-
ship and a family tree “bundled,” says
Morgan, “with with ‘pallid, full-page
portraits of his mother and father’” to
battle rumors of mixed-race ancestry.
He won in a landslide.
After W. E. B. Du Bois collected
and submitted evidence to the SAR to
prove his relatedness to a revolutionary
soldier, he gained admittance to the
Massachusetts chapter but was rejected
by the national organization, which
feared he might “repel white southern-
ers from joining the Sons.” In the most
moving chapter of Morgan’s book, she
recounts Du Bois’s decision, as the
editor of the periodical The Crisis: A
Record of the Darker Races (launched
in 1910 by Du Bois and other members
of the National Association for the Ad-
vancement of Colored People), to pub-
lish a children’s issue in 1914 featuring
eighty-nine photographs of babies and
young children, submitted by readers
and identified only by their state of res-
idence. The images, a few reproduced
by Morgan, capture pride and anxiety
expressed through bows, ribbons, and
ruffles:
The photographs show . . . cherubs
and schoolchildren who were pains-
takingly dressed in white or light-
colored clothing, carefully groomed,
and generally Black or mixed-race.
The older children’s toys, bicy-
cles, and schoolbooks positioned
them far from child labor, which
23
 was still widespread in factories,
mines, and agriculture in the 1910s.
These seemingly innocuous repre-
sentations, that nonwhite babies,
toddlers, and children could be
clean, prosperous-looking, and well
cared for, contested a bundle of ra-
cial stereotypes. . . . Wordlessly, the
procession of impeccably dressed,
round- cheeked children also af-
firmed the endurance of Black and
brown people’s family ties in the
face of wars of attrition on such
bonds. Loving hands had bathed the
youngsters, laundered and ironed
their clothes, arranged their hair,
and photographed them in a pleas-
ing light. Loving attitudes had gar-
nered the children’s cooperation.
Babies and toddlers sat peaceably
before the camera.
The photos were printed, she notes, at
the same time that white-baby monu-
ments were being put up around the
country. By implication the images
refuted “the presumptions of white
supremacy” and the “social-Darwinist
assertion that African Americans’ high
rates of fatal illnesses and infant mor-
tality demonstrated their inferiority
to whites and forecasted a vanishing
race.”
Du Bois’s baby pictures were just
one sign of the importance of docu-
menting family life and lineage, and
Morgan provides detailed discussion
of early genealogical efforts made by
African Americans, Native Ameri-
cans, and American Jews. Blocked by
the national SAR, Du Bois wrote in
The Crisis about his own and others’
connections to the American Revolu-
tion, supporting the formation, in 1930,
of the first major hereditary group for
African Americans, the Society of De-
scendants of New England Negroes.
Yet “genealogical trees do not flour-
ish among slaves,” as Frederick Doug-
lass wrote in 1855. Long after the end of
the Civil War, research remained diffi-
cult for African Americans, who were
often forced to resort to lore and oral
sources. Marriages of enslaved people
had no legal status and often went un-
recorded, as did births. Descendants of
former slaves eager to reconstruct their
families’ stories were hard put to locate
documentary evidence, Morgan writes:
“Jim Crow stalked Black researchers
even in the library. Public libraries in
the South either excluded Blacks alto-
gether or relegated them to inferior,
segregated facilities.”
Better-situated scholars found a way.
At Harvard, Caroline Bond Day, a
mixed-race graduate student in anthro-
pology, wrote her thesis on “Negro-
white families in the United States”
and published it in 1932. Although
she encountered many who shied away
from examining their ancestry and the
history behind it, she interviewed 346
families, including Du Bois’s, record-
ing their names, photographs, profes-
sions, and incomes. “Such people knew
full well that displays of their faces
and lineages, combined with evidence
of successes, affirmed contemporary
struggles against white supremacy,”
Morgan notes. A teacher from Georgia
wrote in response, “What a pleasure it
is to know that our people are accom-
plishing great things!”
Day’s work was followed by that of
the writer, poet, and civil rights ac-
tivist Pauli Murray, whose genealogi-
cal exploration began when she was a
24
teenager as a means of exposing what
she called “Jane Crow,” referring to
Black women’s experience of racism.
She transcribed the recollections of
her “race aunts,” building over some
twenty years an extensive family his-
tory from oral interviews, archival re-
search, letters, and albums. Published
in 1956, Proud Shoes: The Story of an
American Family assembled a multi-
racial family tree. Her grandmother,
born a house slave in North Carolina,
was the biological daughter of her white
master, and Murray’s book proved an
important precursor for Alex Haley’s
Roots.
F rom the Algonquin to the Zuni, in-
digenous peoples in the US possess
a richly complex array of beliefs and
knowledge surrounding their ances-
try. But the federal government’s rap-
idly shifting policies and abrogation
of treaties in the late 1890s threat-
ened to replace such knowledge with
its compendium of tribal “allotment
rolls” and requirements surrounding
“blood quantum,” referring to an indi-
vidual’s percentage of Indian ancestry.
Allotment and blood quanta became
consequential measures affecting the
distribution of land. The Indian Re-
organization Act of 1934 defined an
Indian as someone having at least one-
half Indian blood, and legislation over
the years had the effect of reducing
tribal membership and the amount of
land allotted. Tribal lists omitted those
who refused to comply with enroll-
ment, as well as those of mixed African
American and Indian descent.
Morgan claims that her book is “the
first long history of genealogy in the
United States to incorporate Indige-
nous people’s genealogy practices,” but
the survey, compared to the material
on African Americans, feels shallow.
Speaking of the “segmented nature”
of tribal genealogy and the “decentral-
ized” character of their resources, she
remarks on the dispossession of native
peoples without fully recording how
ancestry and culture were disrupted
by these events. “Such extremes as
government bounties for the mass
slaughter of bison, with which the state
intended to starve out Native resisters,
drew outcries from white reformers,”
she observes, failing to note that there
were bounties not just on bison but
on the scalps of Dakota men, in Min-
nesota, after the US-Dakota War of
1862.
She mentions the high rate of white
families’ “adopting Indigenous chil-
dren” in the 1950s and states that
“mass assimilation and Christianiza-
tion for Native populations in the West
resembled a humane alternative, at
the time,” as if white interpretations
of such policies were exculpatory.
Her brief acknowledgment of “distant
boarding schools” and “government-
ordered family separations” skims the
surface of that long, brutal era, neglect-
ing to recognize the scope of the fed-
eral government’s program of “Indian
schools,” begun in 1860. Designed to
“kill the Indian [and] save the man,”
many were run by churches. Tens of
thousands of Indian children were
seized against their parents’ wishes
and placed in white homes or board-
ing schools, institutions where children
were renamed and beaten for speak-
ing their own languages. Some died of
abuse and neglect, another method of
reducing the amount of land that could
be claimed. In this country, searches
are ongoing for mass graves outside
these “Christian” places; they have
already been found outside residential
schools in Canada.
One institution behind such adop-
tions was the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter- day Saints (LDS), a fact Mor-
gan also fails to include. For its Indian
Student Placement Program, which
ran between the late 1940s and the
mid-1990s, the church placed Navajo
children in Mormon homes to work on
their farms, an especially disturbing
development given that the faithful had
long believed that Native Americans
were descendants of “Lamanites,” who,
according to the Book of Mormon, re-
belled against God and bore the curse
of a “skin of blackness” and an “evil na-
ture . . . full of idolatry and filthiness.”
Believing this racist and fictitious ge-
nealogy, Mormons had seen American
Indians as requiring conversion, while
condemning African Americans to an
even lower order. Blacks were specifi-
cally denied the priesthood, the main
source of power and authority within
the church. Spencer W. Kimball, an
elder and later a president of the church,
claimed in 1960 that the skin of Native
American children became “several
shades lighter” after they spent time in
Mormon homes; Kimball was pleased
that Lamanites were abandoning their
“distorted tradition stories.” Morgan
loses an opportunity to examine in de-
tail the widespread destruction of in-
digenous families and the generational
damage wrought by such attempts to
annihilate children’s ancestral knowl-
edge and culture.
Morgan does spend considerable time
on the LDS, however, which has been
assiduously tracking the genealogies of
virtually everyone it could find for well
over a century. Due to the structure of
A Nation of Descendants—organized
less chronologically than thematically,
around exclusion and inclusion—Mor-
mons keep cropping up in the text like
prairie dogs and figure in the book’s
more colorful passages.
The church’s dedication to geneal-
ogy originated in the unusual temple
practice of baptizing the dead, which
began with founder Joseph Smith. His
1836 revelations included instructions
from on high on how to secure his late,
unbaptized brother Alvin’s tardy sal-
vation. Smith limited the practice to
relatives, but within a few years Mor-
mons were baptizing all and sundry,
including George Washington, who
was immersed by proxy in the Missis-
sippi in 1843, forty-four years after his
death. A later prohibition limited such
baptisms to close family members for
seventy years, even as a future church
president reported, in 1918, a vision of
Jesus Christ christening the dead.
Thanks to these preoccupations, the
church became a considerable force in
genealogy, led by the pioneering work
of Susa Young Gates, one of the church
leader Brigham Young’s fifty-six chil-
dren from sixteen wives. One scholar
has suggested that the church’s encour-
agement of genealogy may have been
meant as a “surrogate for plural mar-
riage,” officially abandoned in 1890.
If so, these polygamous energies have
borne prodigious fruit. In 1944 the
church’s Genealogical Society of Utah
opened its archives to everyone, for
free, and the office gradually evolved
from managing a “huge card file” to
preserving everything on microfilm. In
the 1950s Brigham Young University
began offering the first college courses
on the topic.
The church loosened its strictures
on proxy baptism of the dead in 1961,
just as American Jews were experi-
encing renewed interest in their her-
itage. Morgan notes the Nazi practice
of using family records to identify
Jews and reports one man asking a re-
searcher if they even had genealogies.
But in this country Jewish families’
post-Holocaust curiosity reached a
heightened pitch with the popularity of
the musical Fiddler on the Roof, which
premiered on Broadway in 1964, a phe-
nomenon that led researchers straight
to the extensive records held in Salt
Lake City.
With the publication of Roots: The
Saga of an American Family in 1976,
genealogical fever became a worldwide
phenomenon. Both the book and the
major television series that followed in
1977 had been presaged by Haley’s pop-
ular lecture series, which he launched
a few years after the 1965 publication
of The Autobiography of Malcolm X,
which he had cowritten. In 1967 Haley
had made two trips to Gambia, where
he asked villagers and a local griot, or
storyteller, about dramatic tales he had
heard as a child from female relatives
about an ancestor, Kunta Kinte, kid-
napped from the banks of the River
Gambia and brought to this country
as a slave, renamed Toby. With the
information Haley learned there, he
believed he had located the direct fa-
milial link to his African forebears,
and his lectures served to build in-
terest and to fund further years of
research.
Primed by prior publicity, Roots
spent five months at the top of the New
York Times best-seller list, selling 1.5
million copies in hardcover and mil-
lions more in paperback. Airing over
eight consecutive nights in January
1977, the TV show reached an unprec-
edented 130 million people. Black
viewers especially became enraptured
with the possibilities of diaspora nar-
ratives and “roots travel.” It was a wa-
tershed year: the DAR finally admitted
its first African American member,
although it took years to admit an-
other. Apparently God watched Roots
too, because a year and a half after
the show aired, LDS president Kim-
ball reported a revelation that Black
males could now be admitted to the
priesthood.
Morgan dutifully tracks the influ-
ence of Roots over the following years,
as enthusiasm spread to other ethnic
groups and countries. The first Ameri-
can Jewish genealogical society and pe-
riodical were founded shortly after the
book appeared, along with new organi-
zations devoted to Hispanic and Latinx
ancestry. In another baffling omission
for someone chronicling exclusion,
Morgan barely mentions Asian Amer-
icans. Amy Tan’s 1989 novel, The Joy
Luck Club, doubtless served as another
such turning point, exploring ethnic
and cultural identity and the problems
of assimilation.
Morgan is much better on Roots itself
and its complicated afterlife as a high-
profile example of the uses and abuses
of genealogy. The book had been pub-
lished as nonfiction, but gradually re-
viewers and readers raised questions
The New York Review
about its historical accuracy.* Haley
came to refer to his work as “faction”
(a mixture of fact and fiction) or “the
saga, of us as a people,” acknowledging
that dialogue and other elements had
been fictionalized. In addition, there
were lawsuits based on accusations of
plagiarism. Morgan assiduously un-
tangles these scandals but also points
out that, for most readers, they hardly
seemed to matter. For many African
Americans, Roots in all its forms fed an
insatiable hunger to know their origins
and, as one educator put it, “helped de-
stroy the chilling ignorance of who we
are as a people.”
The reach of Roots was such that the
National Archives and the LDS genea-
logical holdings were mobbed with
seekers from all over the world. So
it was inevitable that the church’s re-
newed taste for proxy baptisms of the
dead would come to light, as it did in
1993, when Gary Mokotoff, the pub-
lisher of a prominent Jewish genealog-
ical magazine, discovered that Anne
Frank and others who had perished in
the Holocaust were baptized posthu-
mously. He declared such acts “partic-
ularly repugnant to Jews,” subjected
for centuries to forcible conversions.
The church banned the practice again
in 1995, but Mormons keep doing it,
recently splashing out to net the grand-
parents of Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton.
G enealogy has now been radically
transformed by digitization, elevating
it to a commercial powerhouse, its re-
sources increasingly available to all. In
1990 two graduates of Brigham Young
University began selling LDS publica-
tions on floppy disks from the back seat
of their car. By 1996 they launched a
website, Ancestry.com. Now boasting
more than three million paying sub-
scribers in thirty countries, the company
brings in over $1 billion in annual reve-
nue. It was sold to a private equity firm
in August 2020 for $4.7 billion. Since
1999 the LDS church has operated a
nonprofit search engine, FamilySearch.
org, offering access to many of the same
sources as Ancestry for free.
A major difference between the two
services is that Ancestry.com sells DNA
home-testing kits, whose results can be
incorporated into family trees on the
site. According to Bloomberg Law,
some 18 million people are represented
in Ancestry.com’s DNA network. Mil-
lions more have availed themselves
of other tests, such as those sold by
23andMe, and the data collected on
multiple sites have corrected the record
on historical figures, identified long-
sought criminals and human remains,
and startled any number of customers
who have learned hitherto unimagined
facts about their families.
Among the most notable of DNA rev-
elations concerned Thomas Jefferson.
For decades, despite rumors and resem-
blances, historians adamantly denied
that he could have fathered children
with Sally Hemings, his house slave
and the half-sister of his deceased wife.
In 1997 the historian and law profes-
sor Annette Gordon-Reed published
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:
An American Controversy, assembling
*See Willie Rose Lee, “An American
Family,” 


  , Novem-
ber 11, 1976.
May 12, 2022
and examining ample textual evidence
for the connection. The following year,
Nature published an article on DNA
results from putative male descendants The future of work from
of the pair showing, in Morgan’s words,
“a very high probability of biological the MIT Press
relatedness.”
That’s the kind of gasp-inducing dis-
closure sought by DNA reality shows,
the most beloved of which stars the
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates
Jr. Beginning with African American
Lives (2006 and 2008) and moving on
to Faces of America (2010) and Finding
Your Roots (2012–present), Gates has
featured celebrities being presented
with “books of life” telling the story of
their ancestors, assembled by teams of
experts in genealogy and DNA. Gates
talks his subjects through the pages, in-
evitably reaching a dramatic “reveal.”
Oprah Winfrey learned, for example,
that a great-grandfather, an illiterate
man named Constantine Winfrey, re-
ceived eighty acres of prime Georgia
farmland from a white man, in ex-
change for growing and picking eight
bales of cotton, or more than three “Inclusion on Purpose “Required reading for “Thought-provoking,
thousand pounds, within two years. shows how to build an the leader and HR deeply researched, and
Morgan sneers at “entertainers’ traf- inclusive workplace manager of the future! invaluable. Will help
ficking in emotions,” as if emotion were and culture through Become versed in a you build, lead, and
fentanyl, discussing Gates in the same storytelling and profound, new under- guide your organization
tone with which she describes Maury practical frameworks. standing of your team through this time of
Povich, the trashy talk show host of the Whether you are a and company’s jobs extraordinary change.”
1990s infamous for outing deadbeat manager or you want to with this incredible
—Gary Hamel, founder
dads with DNA tests. In some ways become one, this book new book.”
of Strategos
her skepticism is justified, since Gates is essential reading!”
—Marshall Goldsmith,
had to apologize in 2015 after bowing —Reema Batnagar, New York Times #1
to pressure from Ben Affleck to delete VP of People, Pixar bestselling author of
material documenting that an ances- Animation Studios Triggers, Mojo, and
tor of his owned slaves, an anecdote What Got You Here
she does not include. The popularity Won’t Get You There mitpress.mit.edu
and influence of Gates’s shows—which
at their best provide an accessible in-
duction into American history—make
them relevant to her discussion. Yet she
devotes as much space to a genealogi-
cal episode of SpongeBob SquarePants
as to what Gates has done, missing the
point of both his shows and contempo-
rary genealogy as a whole. Americans
desperately want stories about their
past, and it was presumably the job of
this book to ask why.
If anything, genealogy thwarts our
emotional needs, revealing only frag-
ments of a story. The data are, almost
inevitably, scant and narratively disap-
pointing. There are revelations to be
had, but barring letters or diaries to
flesh out the tale, seekers are often left
holding a skein of tantalizing connec-
tive tissue, nothing like a complete cor-
pus. As Haley put it, we have “a hunger,
bone-marrow deep, to know our heri-
tage . . . a hollow yearning . . . a vacuum,
and emptiness, and the most disquiet-
ing loneliness.”
For most of us, we’ll never receive
a tidy “book of life,” padded with his-
torical stuffing, like those on Gates’s
shows, because genealogy is elusive, ex-
pensive (in time and money), and frus-
trating. We may be able to trace our
ancestors’ DNA, but we can’t know or
recreate in much depth the motivations
or behaviors of our great-great-great- “The John N. Loomis collection
grandparents, any more than we can
know those of William the Conqueror of Tibetan and Himalayan Tantric sculpture
or Adam or Eve. In that sense, Roots
remains a discomfiting example of that
is astonishing in its erotic and terrific
yearning we feel, looking back across beauty and power.”
time, and the fictional extremes it may
inspire. It took a creative writer to fill ROBERT A. F. THURMAN
in the unbridgeable gaps and breathe
life into characters who had, by the
979-8-9856306-0-2 | HARDCOVER | $95.00 | 208 PAGES | AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON
time their belated author came along,
succumbed to the void. Q
25

Installation view of Elliott Hundley’s The Balcony (2020–2021) at ‘Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow,’ New Orleans
Prospect.5:
Yesterday we said tomorrow
an exhibition in various locations in
New Orleans, October 23, 2021–
January 23, 2022.
Catalog of the exhibition edited by
Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi.
Rizzoli Electa, 271 pp., $60.00
On the afternoon in 1884 that New Or-
leans erected its principal monument
to Robert E. Lee, the heavens let loose
a deluge. It was February 22— George
Washington’s birthday— and thousands
had gathered at a circle on the edge of
downtown. A band played the “Grand
March” from Rienzi, an early opera by
Richard Wagner about a valiant bat-
tle hopelessly lost. Milling among the
various New Orleans civic leaders was
Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard,
the former Confederate general (from
neighboring St. Bernard Parish) who
kicked off the Civil War by attacking
Fort Sumter, helped popularize the use
of the Confederate battle flag, and, fol-
lowing his defeat, did his part to but-
tress the cult of the lost cause. Also in
attendance were two of Lee’s daugh-
ters, Mary and Mildred; Lee had died
of a stroke fourteen years before.
The torrent sent the crowd run-
ning but didn’t dampen the spirits of
the event’s organizers. According to
an account published in The Times-
Democrat the following day, they sim-
ply repaired to a nearby artillery hall.
The paper printed in full the planned
speech by Charles E. Fenner, a local
judge who served as the president of
the R. E. Lee Monumental Associ-
ation, the organization that saw the
monument to completion. The speech
was spectacularly obsequious, hailing
Lee as endowed with “exceptional gifts
of physical beauty” and as a “chivalric
chieftain of the lost cause.”
Like the oratory, the monument to
Lee was hyperbolic—in this case, in
scale. It was composed of a towering
sixteen-foot bronze atop a sixty-foot
Doric column of Tennessee marble on
a base of Georgia granite— all of which
emerged from an earthen berm at the
heart of a well-trafficked roundabout.
It showed the general in his Confeder-
ate service uniform, arms crossed, as
though “overlooking the field of bat-
tle,” according to a newspaper report of
the era. The statue, one of the earliest
and most prominent of the Jim Crow–
26
Tomorrow Is Today
Carolina A. Miranda
era Confederate monuments, stood in
this place for 133 years.
In 2015, after the mass murder of
nine Black parishioners by a white su-
premacist in Charleston, South Caro-
lina, and much public debate about the
purpose of Confederate monuments,
the New Orleans City Council voted
six to one to remove four monuments,
including the one to Lee and a statue
of Beauregard that stood at the en-
trance to City Park. Lee didn’t actu-
ally come down for another year and
a half— after protests, lawsuits, threats
of violence, and actual violence. (The
contractor who had been hired to re-
move the monuments woke up one
morning to find that his sports car had
been incinerated.) On May 19, 2017, the
general’s bronze likeness was finally
plucked off by a crane, then carted to
a warehouse. “The Civil War is over,”
said then mayor Mitch Landrieu on the
occasion; “the Confederacy lost and we
are better for it.”
Left behind at the roundabout were
the granite base and the sixty-foot col-
umn. Lee remains, however, as a ghost.
Though the circle has been stripped
of all reference to him, it has yet to be
officially renamed. “Lee Circle,” there-
fore, still appears as a destination on
Google Maps.
Late in January, a new monument ma-
terialized at the roundabout— one that
is as much a monument to the removal
of monuments as it is to the histories
that Confederate monuments attempt
to obscure. Sentinel (Mami Wata), by
the New York artist Simone Leigh, is
the final public art installation from
“Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomor-
row,” the fifth edition of New Orleans’s
citywide art triennial, which has been
held at semi-regular intervals since
2008. (Originally scheduled for the fall
of 2020, the show finally opened—in
stages—last October and concluded
in January, though Leigh’s monument
will remain on view until late July.)
Sentinel is a twelve-foot bronze in-
spired by the anthropomorphic qual-
ities of Zulu ceremonial spoons, in
which an elongated representation
of the human body serves as handle,
while the circular head functions as
ladle. It is the body as a literal vessel,
something Leigh—who is representing
the US at the 59th Venice Biennale this
spring—has long explored in her work.
In the case of New Orleans, her fig-
ure is a highly stylized representation
of Mami Wata, a female water deity
with deep roots in African lore who
also appears among the cultures of the
Caribbean and the Atlantic coast of
South America under various guises,
including Yemanja in Brazil, Lasirèn in
Haiti, and Oshun in Cuba. (Beyoncé,
in her video for “Hold Up,” from 2016,
pays visual tribute to Oshun by dress-
ing in the deity’s customary yellow and
emerging from a building amid a gush
of water.)
Mami Wata invokes water’s life-
giving qualities and its calamitous pow-
ers, themes resonant in New Orleans, a
city shaped by African and Caribbean
migrations and spiritual practices and
by the bodies of water that surround
it. Water has given the city its shape
and rained destruction upon it, in ways
both natural and man-made. Some of
Prospect.5’s programs, indeed, were
delayed as a result of the widespread
damage caused by Hurricane Ida, a
deadly Category 4 storm that tore
through the region in August 2021.
As the New Orleans essayist and cu-
rator Kristina Kay Robinson writes in
the show’s catalog, “Nothing happens
here without consideration, deference,
and, ultimately, submission to what the
water may bring.”
Lee Circle had until the 1880s been
known as Tivoli Circle, in honor of the
centuries- old gardens in Italy. Before
that, it had been a cypress swamp, a co-
lonial plantation site, and an open plot
that once housed a circus. During the
Civil War, the circle served as a camp-
ground for Union troops. After Hur-
ricane Katrina, the area, which stood
on higher ground and therefore wasn’t
flooded, became an informal day labor
site where workers— many of Latin
American origin— could gather to find
jobs in the reconstruction efforts.
Over the years, countless local per-
sonalities have been pitched as possible
replacements for Lee at Lee Circle, in-
cluding the civil rights leader Avery Al-
exander; the Creole chef Leah Chase;
the musicians Fats Domino, Louis
Armstrong, and Ellis Marsalis (father
of Wynton); as well as Tom Benson, the
late owner of the New Orleans Saints.
In 2019 a sci-fi-inspired Mardi Gras
crew created a replica monument with
a Wookiee from Star Wars occupying
Alex Marks/Prospect New Orleans/
Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, New Orleans
Lee’s place. Last year a city commis-
sion issued a recommendation to re-
name the roundabout Egalité Circle,
inspired by eighteenth- century liber-
ation movements in Haiti and France,
but that appellation has yet to be made
official by the city council. In the mean-
time, some (including the organizers of
Prospect) have simply taken to calling
it Tivoli Circle once again.
Interestingly, Leigh’s Mami Wata
doesn’t stand atop the column that held
Lee aloft. Instead, its sinuous feminine
form resides on the earth—“at the level
of the people,” as Nick Stillman, the ex-
ecutive director of Prospect, told Doug
MacCash of The Times-Picayune/New
Orleans Advocate upon its installation.
The empty column remains as a tribute
to the act of removal and to the activists
who worked for years to make that pos-
sible. It also stands as a marker of the
ongoing debates about how we remem-
ber history in the United States.
T he name “Prospect.5: Yesterday we
said tomorrow” was inspired by a 2010
album by the New Orleans trumpeter
Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Yes-
terday You Said Tomorrow, a recording
whose pointed track titles—“K.K.P.D.,”
“Angola, LA & the 13th Amend-
ment”—refer to police brutality and
the carceral state. With its promise of a
moment that never arrives, the phrase
is an apt description of our pandemic
stasis and the pledges of equality that
succumb to the politics of not-the-right-
time. In the triennial, it took on a barbed
quality. Tomorrow has landed, this show
seemed to tell us, and it is today.
This came to vivid life in an in-
stallation around the corner from
Leigh’s Mami Wata, inside a restored
Romanesque-style library from the
nineteenth century that functions as
an ancillary space for the Ogden Mu-
seum of Southern Art. To access the
library, viewers must enter through the
Ogden’s main door up the block, then
double back through a long, ground-
level tunnel before ascending into
the library up a flight of spiral stairs.
That’s because the museum and the
library buildings do not border each
other; standing between them is the
Confederate Memorial Hall Museum,
a wholly separate institution. The his-
toric hall, where Confederate president
Jefferson Davis’s body once lay in state,
The New York Review
now functions as a museum of Confed-
erate artifacts. (As the Southern Pov-
erty Law Center noted in a report on
Confederate symbols released in early
February, while many monuments have
come down, more than two thousand
memorials remain in place across the
US— not counting shrines such as Me-
morial Hall.)
The journey underneath Memorial
Hall made the Prospect.5 installation
within the library even more mean-
ingful. There, six neon signs bearing
six calendar dates between 2017 and
2020 were hung in the arched reading
room— a work by Glenn Ligon that
marked the days on which Confeder-
ate monuments were removed from
sites around New Orleans, including
Tivoli Circle. The installation, writes
Prospect.5 co- curator Naima J. Keith
in the exhibition catalog, “celebrates
the era when New Orleans dared to re-
define its past, condemning long-tired
tropes celebrating allegiances and ser-
vices to the Confederacy.”
Accompanying Ligon’s work was a
stirring sound loop by Jennie C. Jones
that explored the idea of the crescendo
in Black musical traditions. One por-
tion of it featured three choirs perform-
ing “A City Called Heaven,” a soaring
spiritual popularized by Mahalia Jack-
son. Another was more abstract and
melancholy, sampling a fragment of a
composition for viola by Alvin Single-
ton and fusing it with chimes and elec-
tronic tones. Spatially, these made for
an installation in which past and future
chafed against each other in an uneasy
present— an incisive use of architec-
ture and the histories embedded within
it. Spiritually, the ascendant audio
made it feel as if that history was being
exorcised—though the circular nature
of the sonic loops, along with the cir-
cular layout of the room, indicated a
process that remains ongoing.
Prospect.5 was organized by Keith
and Diana Nawi, who served as artistic
directors, in collaboration with associ-
ate curator Grace Deveney and curato-
rial associate Lucia Olubunmi Momoh.
In addition to museums and galleries,
the triennial featured installations in
plazas, parks, a lakeside airport, and
a dour urban island tucked into an
on-ramp of Interstate 10. That last site
featured Nari Ward’s Battle Ground
Beacon, a portable police floodlight,
which instead of projecting light emit-
ted a rousing, eleven-minute sound
piece once an hour.
Beacon blared Buddhist chants by
Tina Turner punctuated by fragments
of speeches and spoken-word pieces
on race and justice by James Baldwin,
Martin Luther King Jr., and the poet
Amanda Gorman. It felt like a call to
prayer and to resistance—“nourishment
for soul, for meaning, for purpose,” as
Cornel West says in one clip. The audio
is hypnotic (and worth finding on the
Prospect.5 website) and the location
poignant: in historically Black Tremé,
at a site where the neighborhood has
been sundered by an elevated freeway.
On the weekday afternoon I visited,
the only other observers were the com-
muting cars that circled the on-ramp on
their way to somewhere else.
This was a tighter Prospect than in
some years past, featuring fifty- one
artist projects (versus the seventy-three
of the previous iteration, held in 2017).
The show, as has been typical since its
inception in 2008, was international
in scope, but this edition was firmly
rooted in New Orleans. From there, it
radiated outward to the rest of the US,
the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe,
the specific locales to which the city
has been bound by, as Nawi describes
in her catalog essay, the “threads of ex-
change and influence.”
Those threads were visible through-
out the exhibition. At the Historic New
Orleans Collection, a museum housed in
a series of historic homes in the French
Quarter, the scholar and curator Josh
Kun highlighted the curious musical in-
fluence of the Eighth Cavalry Mexican
Military Band. With an exhibition of
sheet music, photographs, and record-
ings, as well as occasional live events, he
brought to life the music of a band that
dazzled New Orleans in the late nine-
teenth century with waltzes, polkas, and
danzones. (You know their work: they
helped popularize a Mexican composi-
tion titled “Sobre las olas”—“Over the
Waves”— an undulating waltz that be-
came the de facto ditty of trapeze acts.)
One neighborhood over, at the Con-
temporary Arts Center in the Ware-
house Arts District, an engrossing
two- channel video installation by Be-
atriz Santiago Muñoz, Cuervo and
Low-Polygon Poem (2021), brought
the Caribbean into view. Shot in Haiti
and the artist’s native Puerto Rico, this
meditative film captures fragments
of two countries connected to New
Orleans by history, by the sea, by the
wrath of storms and the interventions
(or lack thereof) of the US federal
government. Images of fantastic sea
creatures and animations of oceanic
trenches were intercut with shots of
mundane objects, ethnographic obser-
vations, and scenes of surreal entropy—
like a horse scratching its rump on an
old car. Which country each frame
originated in can be hard to tell. As this
puzzling montage unfolds, the voices
of several unseen narrators ruminate
on the nature of reality, memory, and
time. “There is a genre of epic poetry in
Sanskrit,” says a man’s voice in Haitian
Creole at both the beginning and end
of the video, “which tells two tales at
the same time in the same text.”
In its structure, Santiago Muñoz’s
video evokes this form, telling one
tale through audio and an often unre-
lated one through video. Ultimately,
it’s a poetic examination of the parallel
spaces occupied by Haiti and Puerto
Rico, two nations that inhabit neigh-
boring islands in the same geographic
space yet remain disconnected in lan-
guage, cultural practice, and critical in-
frastructure. There are no direct flights
between San Juan and Port-au-Prince;
travel between the two nations gener-
ally requires at least one stop in the
mainland US.
U ltimately, Prospect.5 always brought
the viewer back to New Orleans—with
encounters that were both deliberate
and serendipitous. At the New Orleans
African American Museum, for exam-
ple, works from Prospect.5 casually
intermingled with an unrelated exhi-
bition organized by Kristina Kay Rob-
inson that explored real and imagined
Black spaces. That show contained a
sensational piece by Langston Allston

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May 12, 2022 27

that impressed with its scale: a black-
and-white painting on a wall-sized
white tarp titled Second Line Sunday
that depicts an ebullient Mardi Gras
celebration under a portion of elevated
highway. The scene is framed by a
handwritten text that reads like a fu-
sion of poetry, essay, and diary:
New Orleans, Louisiana. Time
moves differently. People make
themselves bigger by being beauti-
ful. In beads & masks & paint &
on horses & in fast cars & far from
fear & far from peace sometimes
too . . .
Dialogues like this— among artists,
and between artists and the city—
materialized throughout Prospect.5. At
the Ogden Museum, intimately scaled
sculptures of shotgun-style houses and
the shacks of tenant farmers by the late
Beverly Buchanan sat within view of
large-scale drawings of quiet New Or-
leans street scenes by Willie Birch, rep-
resenting visions of vernacular African
American architecture. In another gal-
lery at the Ogden, the Neighborhood
Story Project, a nonprofit organization
devoted to recording the histories of
South Louisiana, presented a series of
installations that examined regional
spiritual practices that have historically
been shepherded by Black women. (It
included a splendid altar to Mami
Wata.)
Across the street at the Contempo-
rary Arts Center, the upper gallery
seemed to respond to these spiritual
themes with a beguiling collection of
pieces by contemporary artists that sat
at the intersection of spirit and land-
NANCY MILFORD
1938–2022
scape. Particularly potent were a se-
ries of works by the late Carlos Villa,
a Filipino American artist from San
Francisco who braided together Asian,
Oceanic, and indigenous artistic tra-
ditions in large-scale canvases with
meditative patterns of looping forms.
These often functioned as backdrops
to arrangements of objects: feathers,
body prints, and details that were, in
some cases, rendered in blood. Sus-
pended from the gallery’s ceiling was
Villa’s 1977 sculpture First Coat, a
ceremonial-style cloak made from can-
vas and feathers that was measured to
his body. Its presence seemed to trans-
form the gallery into a site of religious
ritual.
Prospect.5’s historical, environmen-
tal, and spiritual themes came together
in a small, tightly curated grouping of
work at the Newcomb Art Museum of
Tulane University. In larger-than-life
charcoal drawings, the New Orleans
native Ron Bechet blew up details of
southern Louisiana flora— shrubs, but-
tress root systems, dangling lianas—
and, through stark shadows and
texture, made of them a natural world
filled with such vigor that it awed as
much as it alarmed.
On view in the adjacent galleries were
several of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s
“stele” sculptures, works she conceived
to reimagine the formal language of
monuments. Chase-Riboud, a novelist,
poet, and artist who was born in Phil-
adelphia and now resides in France,
made the first of these back in 1969 to
honor Malcolm X, though she has since
expanded the series to make reference
to other subjects. Slightly larger than
human scale but purely abstract, they
are generally composed of a tangle of
geometric shapes cast in bronze from
which fall resplendent “skirts” crafted
from silk rope and skeins of silk thread.
The artist has described them as draw-
ing on universal forms that occur in
every civilization: as she said during
a talk at the Philadelphia Museum of
Art in 2013, “They occur in Peru, they
occur in China, they occur in Ireland,
they occur in Greece.” At the entrance
to the exhibition stood the stele Mao’s
Organ (2007), a billowing combination
of glimmering polished bronze and
crimson red silk that commanded the
room with extravagant authority.
While Chase-Riboud’s work re-
flected on the ways in which history
is evoked, Los Angeles–based artist
Elliott Hundley focused on the ways
it can be a chimera—via an astonish-
ing forty-foot multimedia collage titled
The Balcony, after a 1956 satire by Jean
Genet. Genet’s play is set in a brothel
where customers pay to role-play pow-
erful men, roles they end up inhabiting
for real when a revolution interrupts
their reverie and they continue their act
before a restive crowd.
Hundley’s sprawling reimagination
of those sordid scenes spans ten con-
joined panels jammed with thousands of
small images that have been clipped out
of books, magazines, and photographs
and impressively arranged by theme
and hue. These included depictions of
ancient and modern art, geometric pat-
terns, architectural diagrams, bodies
in various states of dress and motion,
objects of desire like jewelry and fancy
cars, contested monuments, symbols of
protest, and sundry athletes, entertain-
ers, warriors, and politicians, including
Ronald Reagan— as shown in a black-
and-white reproduction of Thin Lips
(1984–1985), Jean-Michel Basquiat and
Andy Warhol’s painting that depicts the
president as a bogeyman of Western
capitalism, with various economic terms
(“outlays,” “deficit”) stenciled over his
face. In its entirety, Hundley’s collage
reads like a staggering portrait of our
fractured United States, one in which
illusion and reality are hopelessly, dan-
gerously conflated.
It is impossible to write about
Prospect.5 without considering the
reason for its existence: Katrina. Pros-
quired an empty lot in the Ninth Ward
that he transformed into a commu-
nity garden equipped with electrical
outlets and a Wi-Fi hot spot. A set of
concrete steps, once someone’s stoop,
now functions as an impromptu bench.
The property sits amid the vestiges of
other attempts to revitalize the neigh-
borhood, including the houses built by
Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation.
A report published by an urban geog-
rapher from the University of Illinois
in late January revealed that only six
of the original 109 homes— all of which
are less than fifteen years old—“remain
in reasonably good shape.” Two have
been demolished because of mold
problems as others lie empty, and Pitt’s
foundation is now mired in lawsuits.
Beasley is all too aware of the ways in
which his own project could fail. He
told The New York Times’s Siddhartha
Mitter in January, “As we’re breaking
ground on my project, the carcasses of
everything else are still there.”
One artist and one triennial can’t
make up for decades of disinvestment
and disenfranchisement, of course.
But perhaps what they can do is create
moments of meaningful engagement.
Dave McKenzie is a conceptual artist
who was born in Jamaica and now lives
in New York. He was one of a small
group of artists who participated in the
first Prospect New Orleans in 2008 and
were invited back for Prospect.5. (The
others are Mark Bradford, Wangechi
Mutu, Nari Ward, and Willie Birch.)
For that first edition of the show,
McKenzie pitched an action that, at
the time, sounded like a performative
prank: his piece, titled I’ll Be Back,
would consist of visiting New Orleans
once a year for the following decade.
The artist kept his word, traveling to
the city every year, including the year
in which he lost his father, who died in
November 2010. “I always went at the
end of the year,” he told me by phone
from New York.
We were staying at my mother’s
house, and I had to tell her, I know
you’re not feeling well and you’re
grieving, but we’re going to leave
you alone. . . . I’m going to New
Orleans. No one is waiting for me.
There are no consequences for not
going.

pect New Orleans was born of a desire
Celebrated Biographer of Zelda Fitzgerald & to draw visitors to the city and thereby
Edna St. Vincent Millay help it recover economically after the
storm. It was a lofty goal that, in ret-
rospect, was rather fraught— especially
Inaugural Director of the for an art world tangled up in struggles
Leon Levy Center for Biography, 2008 over gentrification in urban neighbor-
hoods and the sources of its patron-
age. Seventeen years after the storm
and fourteen years after the first Pros-
pect, New Orleans is a whiter city. Vast
swaths of the Lower Ninth Ward, the
site of many Prospect installations over
the years, remain empty—the promise
of high culture’s deliverance largely
unfulfilled. As Naima Keith writes in
a sharp, clear- eyed essay in the catalog,
The Leon Levy Center for Biography, “In a city desperately in need of basic
CUNY Graduate Center resources and rebuilding, proposing art
as a tool of healing and justice seemed
simultaneously hopeful and optimisti-
cally naïve.”
It’s a question that at least one art-
ist in the triennial tackled directly. The
New York–based sculptor and perfor-
mance artist Kevin Beasley took his
Prospect.5 commission funds— along
with some of his own money— and ac-
28
That commitment, he added, is “the
crux of the piece. . . . Not only did I say
I was going to go, but if things are dif-
ficult, I’m still going to go.” McKenzie
said his journeys to the city were largely
unremarkable. He didn’t stage per-
formances or pursue some obsessive
checklist. In 2009, he took his father.
For his Prospect.5 project, McKen-
zie bought a niche at Hope Mausoleum
in New Orleans, where he will bury a
bracelet his father once wore. (Because
of Covid he has yet to inter the object,
but three black-and-white photographs
that were on view at the Contemporary
Arts Center recorded the mausoleum
and the bracelet.) He says it is a way of
joining his memories of his father with
those of New Orleans: “This place that
I wanted to go back to was also a place
I would go back to and remember him.”
This rather private gesture will do
nothing to change life in the city. But
it is emblematic of what Prospect.5 was
able to achieve in its most thoughtful
corners. It was about getting to know
New Orleans and, over time, forming a
bond. Q
The New York Review

Wildland:
The Making of America’s Fury
by Evan Osnos.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
465 pp., $30.00
Reign of Terror:
How the 9/11 Era Destabilized
America and Produced Trump
by Spencer Ackerman.
Viking, 428 pp., $30.00
American Made:
What Happens to People
When Work Disappears
by Farah Stockman.
Random House, 418 pp., $28.00
Like so many of us these days, all three
of these journalists are ultimately
searching for the sources of the pickle
we’re in. How could this country elect,
and almost reelect, a semifascist show-
man who flaunts his contempt for facts,
laws, honest elections, and people with
dark skin? Yes, we know the simple an-
swer: the Electoral College. But we still
need to fully probe the sources of Don-
ald Trump’s enormous appeal. After
all, his margins of loss in the popular
vote were not great, and over 11 million
more people voted for him in 2020 than
in 2016. He is working fiercely to get his
supporters into office in this fall’s elec-
tion, and his shadow looms over the
one coming up in 2024.
Evan Osnos was a New Yorker cor-
respondent in China for some years be-
fore returning to the United States in
2013. In Wildland he looks at his coun-
try since then, including events that
he covered as a reporter: the last two
presidential campaigns and the Jan-
uary 6, 2021, invasion of the Capitol.
His portrait is interwoven with visits
to several places where he lived before
going to China, including Greenwich,
Connecticut—his childhood home—
and Clarksburg, West Virginia, where
he started his journalism career.
He finds a “cloven nation,” scarred
by both a political divide and an in-
creasingly vast economic one. In
Greenwich, a center for hedge funds
and their managers, one mogul has
built a house larger than the Taj Mahal
and another a twenty-five- car garage.
At home- construction sites nearby
there are “yellow bulldozers carving
holes for underground movie theaters,
squash courts, and wine cellars.”
In West Virginia, by contrast, people
have been ravaged by the opioid epi-
demic, mountaintops have been sliced
off by coal mining companies, and
drinking water has been poisoned by a
gigantic chemical spill. Everyone takes
pollution so much for granted that a local
team competes “in Roller Derby events
with a logo of a woman in fishnet stock-
ings and a gas mask.” Life expectancy
has plummeted, and even “the state’s
indigent burial fund, which helps poor
families pay for funerals, was bankrupt.”
Meanwhile Peabody Energy, the
world’s largest coal company, cleverly
spun off into a separate corporation
ten unionized mines in the state and in
neighboring Kentucky. The new com-
pany held 40 percent of Peabody’s health
care obligations to retired miners, but
only 13 percent of its coal reserves. It
May 12, 2022
Who’s to Blame?
Adam Hochschild
Union representative Beth Dubree supporting Indianapolis-based employees of Rexnord, a ball-bearing manufacturer,
at a protest against the company’s decision to move three hundred jobs to Mexico, November 2016
soon filed for bankruptcy, abandoning
the former miners and their families.
Connecting two of his chosen corners
of this cloven country, Osnos finds an
investor who had profited from this
cruel—but technically legal—deal in
a twenty-seven-room Georgian manor
with two swimming pools in Greenwich.
Osnos has a nice eye for detail, and
his book reads smoothly, almost a little
too smoothly, as if it were a long, some-
what rambling “Letter from America”
in The New Yorker, where some of the
material originally appeared. It sug-
gests, but doesn’t really address, some
basic questions, such as: Why are peo-
ple in West Virginia not more resentful
of those in Greenwich? Why is their
anger flowing elsewhere? And how
could Trump so skillfully harness it?
Spencer Ackerman proposes an an-
swer to these questions. If Wildland is
a leisurely “Letter,” Ackerman’s Reign
of Terror is a passionate jeremiad. But
it has an important point: don’t blame
all of Trumpism on Trump. His presi-
dential predecessors and rivals helped
pave his path to the White House, and
with it, a channel for the inchoate frus-
trations of tens of millions.
Americans have always been quick to
blame outsiders, Ackerman reminds us.
When a giant truck bomb sheared open
a federal building in Oklahoma City in
1995, killing 168 people and injuring
many more, countless officials and jour-
nalists who should have known better—
even the great Chicago columnist Mike
Royko—assumed the bombers must be
Muslim jihadists. They turned out to
be two homegrown white supremacists,
Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.
Then came the attacks of September
11, 2001, when the culprits were Mus-
lim, and President George W. Bush
declared his war on terror. From then
on, Ackerman shows, the claim that the
main threat to American democracy
was a sinister, elusive network of alien
conspirators was entirely a bipartisan
affair. At every step, Democrats col-
luded with Bush. Democratic senator
Joe Lieberman introduced the bill that
created the Department of Homeland
Security. Barack Obama opposed the
war in Iraq but declared Afghanistan
the “necessary war.” Hillary Clinton
supported both wars as a senator, re-
fused to unconditionally condemn tor-
ture, and as Obama’s secretary of state
dropped hints that she was among the
administration’s hard-liners. When she
ran for president in 2016, a phalanx of
retired generals backed her. Obama’s
stepped-up drone warfare against al-
Qaeda was supervised by the same CIA
official who had run the agency’s torture
sites under Bush. The list could go on.
Reign of Terror runs through all the
grim consequences of Bush’s grandiose
promise, just after September 11, to “rid
the world of evil”: the CIA’s torture op-
eration, the US Army’s humiliation of
prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the Fox net-
work’s glamorization of brutal treatment
in the TV show 24. Franklin Graham
described Islam as “a very wicked re-
ligion” and his fellow evangelist Jerry
Vines called the Prophet Muhammad
a “demon-obsessed pedophile.” Hate
crimes soared against Muslims—and
against anyone who didn’t look like citi-
zens of what Sarah Palin called the “real
America.” At a Sikh temple in suburban
Milwaukee in August 2012, an army
veteran embarked on a shooting spree
that left six dead and four wounded, one
of whom died of his injuries in 2020.
With this sorry history at the center
of politics since 2001, the country was
ready for Trump. And Trump, says
Ackerman,
understood something about the
War on Terror that [his critics]
did not. He recognized that the
9/11 era’s grotesque subtext—the
perception of nonwhites as ma-
rauders, even as conquerors, from
hostile foreign civilizations—was
its engine.
He wielded that insight to eventually
win the White House—starting years
earlier with the charge that Barack Hus-
sein Obama was a secret Muslim born in
Kenya. As Ackerman puts it, “The mor-
tar of birtherism was the War on Terror.”
But even when the target of those
slurs was elected president, he did lit-
tle to change the policies he inherited.
Obama’s Defense Department con-
Mykal McEldowney/ USA Today Network
tinued to distribute up to half a billion
dollars’ worth of surplus military equip-
ment a year to local police, reinforcing
the myth that the enemy without was
also within. Although Obama, espe-
cially in retrospect, voiced some un-
easiness about the tiger he was riding,
Ackerman believes that he “squandered
the best chance anyone could ever have
to end the 9/11 era” by not declaring the
war on terror officially over after Navy
SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
Perhaps. But with the tremendous mo-
mentum of that crusade, Republicans
ruthlessly eager to exploit any signs
of weakness, and the vast amount of
money and number of careers at stake,
truly ending this war would have en-
tailed greater political risks than the
cautious Obama was willing to take.
Trump, of course, further inflamed
the fear whipped up by the war by di-
recting it at new targets closer to home:
“rapists” from Mexico supposedly flood-
ing across the Rio Grande, caravans of
job-grabbing, welfare-abusing refugees
from Central America, Black Lives
Matter protesters, and more. Bernie
Sanders, one of the few truth-speakers
Ackerman finds during this dark era,
said it best: “There is a straight line from
the decision to reorient US national-
security strategy around terrorism after
9/11 to placing migrant children in cages
on our southern border.”
T he demonization of Muslims and
foreigners, however, was not the only
precondition for Trump’s race-based
politics of ressentiment. A profoundly
important additional one—a sea
change in the US economy—is the sub-
ject of the best of these three books,
Farah Stockman’s American Made.
One of its virtues is that she periodi-
cally shares a little of herself, but never
so much that the narrative becomes
self- centered. As the product of an in-
terracial marriage between two college
professors, she found that
if a white waitress treated our fam-
ily rudely, my mother, who’d expe-
rienced blatant racism all her life,
assumed that the waitress disap-
proved of interracial couples. My
29
 father . . . thought she must be
cranky after a long day on her feet.
I always wondered which one was
right. That was why I became a
journalist, to talk to the waitress.
Institute for Stockman is wise enough to see, how-
ever, that the story she tells here—and
the difference between herself and the
Ideas & Imagination people she is writing about—has less to
do with race than with class.
A few weeks after the 2016 election,
a large ball-bearing factory prepared
is proud to announce its 2022–23 Fellows: to close. “Rexnord of Indianapolis is
moving to Mexico and rather viciously
firing all of its 300 workers,” tweeted
Trump. “No more!” The first part of
Yevgenia Belorusets Sabelo Mlangeni Trump’s tweet was, unusually for him,
Writer/Visual Artist Abigail R. Cohen Fellow fully accurate. The second was not, be-
cause he ultimately did little to reverse
Ukraine Photographer the enormous outflow of American
South Africa manufacturing jobs to low-wage coun-
Barry Bergdoll tries. Stockman’s vivid, gracefully writ-
ten account, an outgrowth of reporting
Abigail R. Cohen Fellow John Duong Phan she first did for The New York Times,
Architectural History Vietnamese Studies zeroes in on the lives of three steel-
Columbia University Columbia University workers at Rexnord: John Feltner, a
white man; Shannon Mulcahy, a white
woman; and Wally Hall, a Black man.
Alessandra Ciucci Katharina Pistor For John, who calls himself a hillbilly,
Ethnomusicology Comparative Law working at Rexnord meant carrying on
Columbia University Columbia University a proud union tradition, just like his fac-
tory worker father and coal miner grand-
father and great-grandfather. A union
William Dougherty Hannah Reyes Morales job gave John the security he needed to
Composer Photographer avoid bankruptcy, which he had been
Columbia University Philippines through once, and to dream of a better
life for his kids. He was an official of
his local, and he and his wife held their
Isabella Hammad Pauchi Sasaki son’s wedding rehearsal dinner at the
Writer Composer union hall. For Shannon, who grew up
United Kingdom Peru in a trailer park, a job at the factory was
a chance to escape an abusive man and,
later, pay the medical bills of a disabled
Yala Kisukidi Yasmine Seale grandchild. And for Wally, it was a step
Philosopher Translator up into steady employment; only after
France United Kingdom Stockman had known him for a year—
her kind of reporting takes immense pa-
tience—did he reveal that he had spent
Brian Larkin Ersi Sotiropoulos time in prison for drug dealing.
Anthropology Writer All three of them took pride in their
work, cherishing possibly aprocryphal
Columbia University Greece stories of how the ball bearings they
expertly crafted ended up inside a re-
Melina León Eliza Zingesser tractable stadium roof or a nuclear
Abigail R. Cohen Fellow Medieval French and Occitan submarine. Shannon felt particularly
proud at learning skills that the men
Filmmaker Columbia University around her first claimed were beyond
Peru the reach of any woman:
If the batch furnace spat flames like
the gates of Hell, she knew how to
Located at Reid Hall, home to Columbia Global Centers | Paris, calm it down. If the autoquench—
the Institute hosts a residential community of scholars, writers, as high maintenance as an aging
and artists. beauty queen—stopped in midcy-
cle, she knew how to coax it into
Please visit our website at ideasimagination.columbia.edu for performing again. . . . Her favor-
further details about our Fellows and their work, the Institute and ite furnace was the Tocco, which
broke down like a needy boyfriend
its mission, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities when she left it alone too long.
Initiative, and our emergency program of assistance for Ukrainian
writers, journalists, and artists. Eventually men would sometimes ask
her for technical advice.
There were hints that the jobs at Rex-
The Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination is made possible by the generous nord might not last forever. The factory
support of the Areté Foundation, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the Andrew speeded up its output of bearings, but
W. Mellon Foundation, and Daniel Cohen, and with additional gifts from Judith “almost all of them were being shipped
Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc, Olga and George Votis, the EHA Foundation, and Mel to a warehouse rather than to a cus-
and Lois Tukman. tomer.” And during labor negotiations,
the company was surprisingly quick to
agree to some union demands. Still, the
move to Mexico came as a shock.
Stockman notices that the plant’s
Black employees seemed less dis-
traught than the white ones, for they
had mostly grown up without the ex-
pectation of secure and lasting jobs.
Workers differed in their willingness to
30
train the people taking over from them.
Fearing that it might make it easier for
the plant to close, the union had not de-
manded obligatory severance payments
in its contract with Rexnord. The com-
pany now said it would give severance,
and a raise for their remaining weeks
on the job, only to those who were will-
ing to train their replacements.
Some workers balked and saw to it
that factory machinery arrived in Mex-
ico missing essential parts, but others,
desperate to earn what they still could,
agreed to do the training. One of the
most poignant moments in a book that
abounds with them comes when the
warmhearted Shannon can’t help but
befriend the Mexicans who have come
to learn how to do her work: “Tadeo,
who was the same age as her son, seemed
like a sweetheart.” He apologizes, hand
on heart, for taking her job—something
some of the Mexicans apparently hadn’t
understood would be the case when
they were sent to Indiana for training.
Shannon compares notes with another
Mexican, Ricardo, and they realize that
he is paid one sixteenth of her salary.
On the day that Shannon’s beloved
Tocco furnace was loaded onto a truck
for Mexico, there happened to be an
eclipse of the sun. She watched it out-
side the factory with Ricardo: “In an
instant, the sunny afternoon turned
dark as night.”
T he American industrial working
class has endured stress before, and it
often didn’t end well. A century ago,
for instance, when such workers were
overwhelmingly white and male, they
faced competition for scarce jobs from
the more than four million men released
from the army at the end of World War
I, from immigrants, and from the Great
Migration of Black Americans moving
north. Immigrants and Blacks became
the scapegoats. One result was the
1924 immigration bill, which largely
slammed the country’s door shut for the
next four decades. Another was some of
the worst racial violence since the end
of slavery. Hundreds of Black Amer-
icans were killed in the Red Summer
of 1919, and possibly as many as three
hundred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921,
when white mobs torched three dozen
blocks, including a thriving business
district known as Black Wall Street.
“For too long,” President Biden said
last June at the centennial observance
of the Tulsa massacre,
we’ve allowed a narrowed, cramped
view of the promise of this nation to
fester—the view that America is a
zero-sum game where there is only
one winner. “If you succeed, I fail.
If you get ahead, I fall behind. If
you get a job, I lose mine.”
Instead, a lot of us would like to feel that
we’re all in it together: if you get ahead,
I can get still ahead too. But Stockman’s
sensitive portrait shows how the world
is not that way for millions of Ameri-
cans. “There are only so many jobs in
this building,” a white union steward
warned one of Rexnord’s first Black
workers. “And if you take one, that
means that our sons or son-in-law or our
nephew can’t have it.” And on top of
this, for people like those at Rexnord, is
the prospect that there may abruptly be
no more jobs in the building at all.
The combined impact of disap-
pearing jobs and the widening gap
The New York Review
between workers like Stockman’s trio
and Osnos’s hedge fund millionaires in
Greenwich means an end to one facet
of the American dream: that you will
earn more than your parents. That was
true for 90 percent of people born in
1940 but is the case for only 50 percent
today. And those who lost their jobs at
Rexnord, like most people without col-
lege degrees, know they’re not in that
fortunate 50 percent.
This was the mood of threat that
Trump spoke to and magnified so bril-
liantly. As Stockman puts it, “Trump
had a chip on his shoulder, like the
steelworkers did.” When the Carrier
Corporation, just down the road from
Rexnord, also announced plans to
move jobs to Mexico, Trump, at an In-
dianapolis rally, “asked Carrier work-
ers to call out their years of seniority.
Ten years. Seventeen years. Eigh-
teen. . . . Trump told workers what they
wanted to hear: that they deserved their
jobs because they were Americans.”
Of course, he couldn’t save most
such jobs, or deliver on his promises
to “bring back coal!” (production of
which dropped precipitously during
his presidency) or to abandon job-
vacuuming NAFTA (he did little more
than change the name). But however
fraudulent his rhetoric, it addressed
deep fears. And even if health or legal
troubles remove Trump from the polit-
ical scene, he has still charted the path
for imitators to follow.
All three of Stockman’s subjects
struggle to find new work. Shannon,
who has dreams about the factory,
runs into several old colleagues at a job
fair, but they’re leery of manufacturing
positions for fear another plant may
May 12, 2022
close. The saddest fate befalls Wally,
the Black man. He suffers an apparent
heart attack but adamantly refuses to
go to the emergency room, having once
been billed $27,000 for an appendec-
tomy. A few days later he is dead. At
his funeral, Stockman writes, a friend
from the factory “recited a ritual text
about death being a great equalizer,
felling both pauper and prince. Yet . . . a
prince would have gone to the hospi-
tal when he had chest pains. A prince
would have had health insurance.”
Again arises the question of anger.
Who can Wally’s friends and family
blame for his vanished job and lack of
insurance? After all, Shannon thinks, it
was the company that made the decision
to send the factory to Mexico. But who
was ultimately responsible? Could they
be appealed to? In recent years the plant
was first owned by a British conglomer-
ate, which sold it to the Carlyle Group,
a private equity firm (with a Greenwich
connection, incidentally: George H.W.
Bush, who grew up there, was a Carlyle
adviser after his presidency). Then Car-
lyle sold it to another private equity firm,
which used Rexnord’s assets as leverage
to borrow money, then sold it to a group
of mutual funds. “Shannon never did
find the list of shareholders,” Stockman
writes. It is no wonder that for a time,
her “Facebook page filled up with con-
spiracy theories.” On the pages of other
workers, Stockman finds rumors that
China has purchased the Grand Canyon.
T he most dangerous tinder for any
kind of fascist movement is people who
are losing ground economically. Sup-
port for Hitler rose dramatically when
millions of Germans lost jobs in the
Great Depression—which also spurred
the rise of other far-right movements
or dictatorships throughout much of
Europe, in addition to strengthening
Mussolini’s hold on Italy. In the United
States, we were lucky to have a presi-
dent who could powerfully respond to
the crisis in a different way, but other
voices still had appeal: by some esti-
mates, tens of millions of Americans
listened to the diatribes of the “radio
priest” Father Charles E. Coughlin,
who loathed Jews and admired Mus-
solini and Hitler. Before he was assas-
sinated in 1935, the demagogic Huey P.
Long of Louisiana was attracting fol-
lowers from the rest of the country and
preparing a run for the White House.
The tinder is there today in the peo-
ple Stockman portrays: men and women
who are unlikely to ever again earn a de-
cent wage from manufacturing, and who
may never earn an equivalent wage from
anything else. To the half of Americans
who are losing ground economically,
both Republicans and Democrats have
offered little of substance. But Trump
gave them something crucial: people to
blame. John Feltner, Stockman’s long-
time union loyalist, voted for him in two
elections and, she notices one day, has a
Confederate flag in his garage.
Is it any wonder that people like him
listen to racist pundits like Tucker Carl-
son who talk of the “Great Replacement”
of white people? American workers are
indeed being replaced: by Tadeo and
Ricardo in Mexico, by low-paid laborers
in China and other countries, and, per-
haps most of all, by machines. The Black
workers at Rexnord—40 percent of the
total—are being replaced as well.
Are there solutions to these hard-
ships? They won’t be complete, quick,
or easy, but we can picture some: ac-
cessible, well-thought- out retraining
programs, a better safety net against
unemployment, health insurance on a
par with other developed nations, in-
creased taxation of great wealth, rene-
gotiating world trade rules that make it
so easy for jobs to race to the lowest-
wage countries. Brown University’s
Costs of War project estimates that the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars, plus inter-
est and veterans’ care expenses, will
eventually cost us more than $8 tril-
lion. Imagine if that money had gone
toward better educating Americans for
jobs in our fast-automating economy
and protecting them from some of its
risks. Our social landscape could be
significantly different.
Even before the Trump years, how-
ever, our sclerotic political system was
ill- equipped to consider such programs
seriously, distorted as it is by the dis-
proportionate power that thinly popu-
lated, conservative rural states have in
the Electoral College and the Senate.
Not to mention that the Democratic
Party is almost as much under the sway
of corporate lobbyists as the Republi-
cans are. But now, as tinder smolders
and Trump, his imitators, and a pow-
erful right-wing media complex fan it
into flame, something more is happen-
ing. In states they control, Republicans
are attempting to suppress voting by
ethnic minorities and the poor, and
to put the counting of votes in highly
partisan hands. If we cannot turn back
the Great Replacement of democracy
itself, the path ahead will look as dark
as that day of the solar eclipse. Q
31

Rose Wylie, who is now eighty-seven,
has been painting in the same rural
studio in Kent, England, since the late
1960s, but she has only recently shim-
mered into wide public view. Incredi-
bly, the show of large-scale paintings
held last spring at David Zwirner was
only her third appearance in New York,
and the first in a big-time gallery.* She
who laughs last and all that.
Wylie is the opposite of what comes
to mind when you think of an artist of
a certain age rusticating in the Home
Counties. She is a painter of verbs, and
her large canvases (typically six feet
by ten feet, more or less) are full of
action: people dancing, playing sports,
ice-skating, vamping, or working at a
task, like butchering meat or driving
a car. Her approach to form is boldly
idiosyncratic; her brush shoots around
the whole body, and the way she paints
people is like stylized Morse code:
the eyes and mouths often reduced to
mere dots and dashes, the hair a mass
of wavy brushstrokes, and the flattened
forms heavily outlined in thick black or
red oil paint. Wylie has a thing for faces
seen in profile, and bodies too, maybe
because they are easy to animate at
that angle, and they give her paintings
a jaunty, spirited feeling. Her work
projects a “can- do” attitude; it’s full
of pep.
She gets a lot of mileage out of paint-
ing eyelashes, as well as full skirts, soc-
cer balls being kicked, brick walls, and
ocean waves—anything that can be
represented by rhythmically organized
lines and sets of lines. Her streamlined
figures project speed and immediacy,
but they are not just hieroglyphs. The
handmade quality, the feeling of an
image arrived at through careful in-
the-moment looking, is always present.
*“Rose Wylie: Which One,” April
28–June 12, 2021. A catalog of the
exhibition will be published by David
Zwirner Books this fall.
32
Going on Her Nerve
David Salle
Rose Wylie: I Like To Be, 2020
In the syntax of painting, the qual-
ity of line and the amount of pressure
exerted in its making endow a painting
with a good part of its energy. Wylie’s
grasp of mark-making is almost outra-
geously assured. She shows how line
can both describe an image and at the
same time be an image. Her confidence
that the brush is doing the right thing
never wavers.
Where did she come from, and why
hadn’t we seen her before? Although
Wylie (born in 1934) is a contempo-
rary of David Hockney, she is part of
the generation of English painters who
came of age after he reset the clock on
British art. In Britain before 1960, even
modernist-inflected painting was largely
based on direct observation—i.e., real-
ist—or loosely illustrational, something
that looked good on the page. There was
more, to be sure: homegrown abstrac-
tion, like John Hoyland and his con-
freres, the St. Ives landscape painters,
not to mention the distortions of Francis
Bacon and his school. But the dominant
modes were scenes painted whole rather
than fragmented, in either a version of
straight realism or a more fanciful and
illustrative modernist shorthand.
Hockney collapsed the two modes
into one and introduced a fractured
pictorial space into the bargain. And
his finely calibrated distance from both
popular culture and art history could
be seen as gently, affectionately ironic.
Although irony had long been a favored
literary device, Hockney was among
the first painters to give it visual form.
By the 1970s, the ironical quoting of
cultural motifs was commonplace—the
pictorial equivalent of making notes
in the margin of your copy of Shake-
speare’s plays—but the level of finish
seen in English painting was generally
refined. The kind of paintbrush-as-
meat- cleaver attack that Wylie carries
out now would have seemed gauche in
Rose Wylie/David Zwirner
the 1970s. Her work was, and remains,
barely housebroken.
Wylie showed early promise in draw-
ing and painting. She attended a local
art school as a young woman and went
on to the teacher-training course at
Goldsmiths in London, where she met
the painter Roy Oxlade; they married
in 1957. After graduating in 1959, the
couple found a farmhouse in Kent with
dilapidated barns that could be used as
studios, and began a life dedicated to
painting and teaching and getting by.
They had three children, and Wylie put
her own work on hold to care for them
more or less full-time. Twenty years went
by. She returned to school in 1979, at the
age of forty-five, this time at the Royal
College of Art, at the beginning of what
would be a very consequential decade
for painting in general and for English
art in particular. Something catalyzed
then in her work, though it would be
years before it started to attract serious
attention. Eventually she was included
in a couple of important group shows,
regional museum shows followed, and
then the dealers came calling.
Wylie is no outsider artist, and her
work should not be celebrated simply
because success found her late in life.
She is the real deal, and it took as long as
it took. I’m just glad that she stayed the
course. Her modernist bona fides are
most apparent in her casually brilliant
cut-and-paste compositions; she strate-
gically distributes her forms across the
canvas in a manner that recalls the re-
peats of sophisticated wallpaper or fab-
ric design, two high points of English
visual culture in the mid-twentieth
century. In a final nod to craft culture,
she often embellishes her works with
strokes of paint aligned with the canvas
edge, like a hand-painted frame.
The whole effect is so blithely “I
don’t give a damn about fashion” as
to be totally winning. One simply sur-
renders to her way of looking at things.
Wylie’s paintings call to mind some-
thing John Cage once said in a docu-
mentary, with his inimitable, grinning,
I-might-be-a-fool optimism, about his
efforts as Merce Cunningham’s re-
hearsal pianist: “If you think the mu-
sic’s bad now, just stick around.” She is
interested in the vitality of seeing, not
in realism, and if that results in some
strange-looking heads and Kewpie- doll
lips, that’s not her problem.
She finds much of her imagery in
magazines, advertising, televised
sports, or films. Many of her canvases
feature athletes—tennis players, figure
skaters, swimmers—which possibly
makes her the only serious artist since
Degas to take up the sporting life as a
subject. Sometimes she paints what’s
outside the window—a cat, some grass,
a tree—but most of her paintings are of
things that have already been pictured
in one way or another. Her subject is
simply whatever catches her eye.
Most artists are good noticers, and
Wylie registers the stuff that we might
all see in passing but usually decide is
too banal or would require too much
effort to translate into a visual short-
hand. She paints a TV dance-show
contestant in rather the same spirit
as Jasper Johns paints the American
flag: both paint what the mind already
knows but the eye often skips over.
What differentiates her work from
that of other noticers of the quotidian,
like Luc Tuymans, for example, is her
interest in the bright surface of celeb-
rity. Wylie doesn’t have a censorious
attitude toward her subject matter—
she’s neither superior nor a prude. Her
images arrive on the canvas with an
impartial delight, like the way a child
might blurt out, “Look at that fat guy!”
Her work feels unencumbered by the
language of therapy or politics—that’s
part of its great freedom.
Painting images is fundamentally a
matter of translation, and Wylie’s thick
impasto lines are a record of her taking
on the spirit of her subjects, attempting
to draw herself into the way something
makes her feel, like the sense of ebul-
lience we get from watching a cham-
pion athlete compete. Wylie transforms
spectatorship into something protean;
she’s the Cézanne of channel surfing.
P eople have been putting paint on
canvas for centuries, during which the
materials haven’t changed much. What
distinguishes every painter is the spe-
cific qualities of touch, the way the
brush makes contact with the canvas.
This is part of what is called an art-
ist’s style, and more than anything else
Wylie’s work is defined by her mode of
dragging paint over unprimed cotton,
the loaded brush giving way to scum-
bled, dry-brushed edges on her shapes
and marks. She applies paint to canvas
in much the same way that one would
apply icing to a cake—spreading it out
thickly to the edges. That’s what came
to mind when I first looked at her paint-
ings, and I was pleased to see her use
the same analogy in an interview. She
makes much of the inherent drama of
the raw cotton’s resistance to the drag
of the paint; the way it comes to rest
at the edges of a shape is the stuff of
painterly drama. (Clyfford Still pretty
much made a career out of it.)
The New York Review
 Wylie uses several different ways of
applying paint. In addition to the cake
knife and the scumble, there are the
wavering, overpainted line, the chunky
block letters built out of short strokes,
and what looks like flicking paint off
the edge of a palette knife, with thick
globs hitting the canvas here and there.
Her other device is the overpainted
outline that gives definition to her
otherwise approximate figures, and to
details like hair and clothes and other
accoutrements.
The important part—one wants to
say the art part—is that all of Wylie’s
lines and marks and paint drags are
also shapes. This is the first principle
of painting, and Wylie takes it to heart.
Then she explodes it. She also has the
great gift of knowing when to stop.
Wylie’s way of using a paintbrush to
describe form is direct and unfussy,
but achieving that effect is more com-
plicated than it looks. The unarguable,
gutsy outlines are the end point of a
process of remembering and refining.
I gather that her method is something
like this: she sees an image in a mag-
azine or on TV, say of a tennis match,
and then, days or weeks later, makes
charcoal drawings of it from memory,
deliberately letting time go by so that
only the essentials remain. The draw-
ing is the sum of specific details that
stay in the mind’s eye after the original
image has faded. These drawings, re-
worked and reanimated, sometimes cut
up and collaged together, then form the
basis for the paintings.
This translation from memory to
drawing is one of the factors that give
Wylie’s work its sense of freedom; the
forms, though inspired by something
pictured in the media, seem to spring
directly from her head. Straight, ob-
servational realism is for wimps. She
doesn’t worry about things like shoul-
ders or necks when painting her figures,
and especially not hands (why bother?);
arms are like strands of pulled taffy that
end in narrowed stumps, sometimes
with only the slightest nubs for fingers.
Legs are like Gumby dolls, or hams,
or tadpoles; and feet are either impres-
sively shod or appear as small triangles.
You can imagine her unapologetic inner
monologue while painting: Oh, did I
forget to give that person a shoulder? I
didn’t think he needed one. Wylie is not
painting a person in any case, but her
memory of a picture of a person. Nev-
ertheless, in the alchemy of paint, her
figures are full of personality: they kick
and leap and fly around the canvas.
Sometimes her paintings feature
preposterously enlarged views of quo-
tidian reality. Breakfast (2020) is a ten-
foot-long rectangle in two parts that
features a white plate with a blue scal-
loped rim floating on a mostly black
background. On the plate rests an
enormous black spoon, a rectangle of
scumbled gold- orange paint (yogurt?
porridge? toast?) and a few berries
scattered around. The scaling up of an
intimate domestic image, painted with
the finesse of a road crew laying down
asphalt, is mind- expanding. It’s as if
Bonnard had taken a tab of acid with
his morning café au lait and suddenly
picked up a three-inch-wide brush in-
stead of his habitual quarter-inch fil-
bert. Yet even when she is slathering
on great globs of paint, her touch stays
purposeful and light.
Wylie often incorporates the titles
into her compositions, either with cap-
ital letters of thick impasto (Break-
May 12, 2022
fast) or with an elongated, condensed
typeface, like the kind used for elegant
moderne stationery in the 1930s and
1940s (Fluffy Head, 2020). The im-
pulse to write on paintings, to make de-
sign elements out of letters and words,
has shown up periodically in Western
art for over a century, but Wylie makes
it feel new. In Breakfast, the title is
spelled out in caps in broad, semicare-
ful brushstrokes of raw sienna along the
bottom edge on the black ground. The
scale is declarative, like someone shout-
every leaf
a hallelujah
ing into a megaphone. The big blocky
letters are also kind of slapstick, like a
pratfall or a poke in the eye. Get it?
W ylie’s belief in her own choices is
bracing; she calls to mind Frank O’Ha-
ra’s dictum “You just go on your nerve.”
On first glance her paintings may ap-
pear to be blown-up drawings made by
a blithely unselfconscious child. In the
next instant, their deliberateness and
formal sophistication swamp that ini-
tial impression; every mark and color
and wonky bit of drawing is fueled by
a decisive engagement with painting,
carried out with a disregard for the
conventions of representation. She fits
the late artist and film critic Manny
Farber’s description of the “termite
artist”: an efficient and unconcerned
omnivore tunneling under the surface
of things (or on the surface, in this
case), taking only what she can use and
discarding the rest.
Wylie’s concern is for the way we
experience the world as a series of still
pictures, often in close-up, and how
those pictures can be bigger and more
persuasive than the real thing. She’s a
twenty-first- century painter of modern
life, an “I am a camera” with a brush.
With their distilled forms and self-
captioned texts-as-titles, Wylie’s pic-
tures are like memes in paint. But none
of this ontological filigree would matter
very much if it weren’t for her ability
to orchestrate the formal elements of
painting into an indivisible whole. Her
gift for making an overlooked bit of “A slender fable about the power of the
cultural signage into a surprising image
is combined with an uncanny sense of individual to save society as a whole…Ejaita’s
where and how to place it within the bright illustrations, influenced by African
overall composition; she deploys her textile traditions, bring ancient oaks,
mnemonic distillations with a collag-
sequoias, and bristlecone pines to life.”
ist’s sense of mobile improvisation.
Both aspects of her art—the noticing —New York Times
and the arranging—are underscored
by a tremendous freedom to bend the
image to her subjectivity, to cut it up “A magical world of beauty and color, an
and move it around on the canvas at enchanting array of extraordinary trees,
will, and finally to combine it with frag- each with its own personality and voice.”
ments of ornamentation or other bits of
painterly derring- do. Her motto could —The Africa Center
be “Amuse thyself,” and her method The Top African Books of the Year
summed up as “improvise, then re-
vise.” Her work is a good example of
the absolute specificity and the in-the- “A quest with all the authority of
moment control necessary to make a an established folktale.”
painting rise above the predictable.
Wylie is also something of a sponge. —The Guardian
The list of artists with whom she inter-
sects, visually or spiritually, goes all “A charming, heartfelt
the way back to the Egyptians. She’s environmentalist fairy tale,
attracted to how artists working be-
fore the invention of perspective used this gem will resonate with
highly stylized, static figures in rhyth- both adult fantasy readers
mic sequences to convey continuity and and their children.”
movement, and Byzantine and early
Renaissance paintings are echoed in —Publishers Weekly
her hierarchies of scale and placement.
Skipping ahead a few centuries, Wylie
shows fellow feeling for Francis Picabia, OTHER PRESS otherpress.com
that other master of the overdeliberate
eyelash. Artists of the more recent past
33
such as Neil Jenny, Georg Baselitz,
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Donald Baech-
ler, William Copley, Lee Lozano, and
Judith Bernstein come to mind in large
or small ways as either precursors or
fellow travelers. They all share a sen-
sitivity to mark-making and a blunt
image shorthand that owes something
to outsider art and early comics. Wylie
seems to have taken cues from or at
least looked at them all, pumping up the
scale as well as the anecdotal humor.
Some of Wylie’s paintings look as
though they began life as drawings by
the master ironist Sigmar Polke. A cru-
cial element in Polke’s drawings was
the ability to convey the subtle relation-
ship between mockery and admiration.
Wylie shares that sensibility, and her
choice of images can be just as endear-
ing. Choco Leibnitz (2006) depicts a
cookie—the brand shares a name, give
or take a letter, with the seventeenth-
century German philosopher—about
to be popped into an enormous open
mouth. The lips edged in red, along with
the nose and chin, are seen in profile at
the painting’s left edge, while the cookie
itself appears to fly through the air, ac-
companied by a few black lines signify-
ing motion. For reasons that may have to
do with the depiction of time and space,
the last two letters of the logo—“T” and
“Z”—break free of the cookie’s surface
on their journey to the open mouth.
The wackiness of the concept, along
with the directness and simplicity of
the staging, evokes Polke’s affectionate
appropriations.
But perhaps the artist with whom
Wylie has most in common is Julian
Schnabel, especially with the work he
was making from 1979 to about 1982,
which coincided with her return to art
school in London. Although she has
said that she was unaware of his work
at that time, she would likely have been
exposed to it as well as that of his co-
hort at “A New Spirit in Painting,” a
groundbreaking exhibition at the Royal
Academy of Art in 1981. In any case,
it’s not a question of influence so much
as what was in the air, what the permis-
sions were at the time, and how those
permissions were changed or enlarged
by individual talents. What both artists
share is a method of transferring greatly
enlarged details of a sketch onto a huge
expanse of canvas using a large brush.
There’s a common perception of
Schnabel’s work that it’s bombastic and
walks with a macho swagger, a mischar-
acterization that was leveled at an entire
generation. This is mostly nonsense. Es-
pecially in the early 1980s, Schnabel’s
work had a delicacy and refinement
even at large scale. Both he and Wylie
seek out subjects that convey a kind of
enchantment, or whimsy, and they both
use charm as a means of persuasion.
It’s tantalizing to think that the two of
them, separated by an ocean, arrived at
such similar styles autonomously, but in
any case the emphasis on who did what
when is often misplaced. Art doesn’t re-
ally “progress” as such, but artists often
advance in their own work by confront-
ing the work of others; they sense a lib-
erating possibility in a way of painting
and adapt it to their own sensibility.
There is an important difference
between influences—the rich stew of
aesthetic kin—and actual sources. The
first is like weather while the second is
more of a template. One type of visual
narrative that has been a source for
34
Wylie is the tradition of Mexican folk-
art paintings known as retablos, which
began in the eighteenth century as small
devotional scenes and evolved in the
twentieth into printed books of con-
densed, campy narratives that abound
with images of grief, eros, violence,
comedy, or religiosity. Retablos typically
feature an illustrative scene with a hand-
written commentary in a separate box
underneath. In the Zwirner show there
were several works whose titles included
the phrase “homage to retablos paint-
ing,” and Wylie milks the format for
all its narrative compression and com-
positional audacity. The retablos world
seems to have given her not just the
Rose Wylie: Illuminated Manuscript, Adam and Eve, 2020
“storyboard” format with the handwrit-
ten surmise, but also a quirky, less than
anatomical approach to painting figures:
the small heads with tiny features and
approximate hair, and the rubbery limbs
that extend from shoulderless bodies.
Wylie’s work projects an externalized,
outwardly focused view of the world
that nonetheless insists on its own sub-
jectivity. Her subject overall seems to
be the exhilaration and self-validation
that result from importing things in the
world to the realm of the painted—a
kind of constructed enchantment. She’s
the Sugar Plum Fairy of painting. Of
course, this kind of thing has been going
on forever, but she finds a way to make it
feel new. Wylie has said that she comes
from the tradition of painting what she
sees out the window, but I suspect that
her real fixation is the way things come
to us through cultural ephemera, with
some more observational motifs thrown
into the mix. There’s a sense of wonder
at how the commercial world seeks to
create in the casual viewer feelings of
hierarchies, logic, and coherence—of
cause and effect. The conventions and
assumptions of pictorial presentation,
the world as it represents itself, are what
seem to hold her attention; the charm
and absurdity encoded in the most
banal types of images incite her.
Scale is an important aspect of
Wylie’s pictures; it’s part of her self-
assurance. Working on nine- or ten-
or even twelve-foot-wide canvases
necessitates the use of large brushes
and the whole arm in the application
of paint. No place for noodling, to use
Alex Katz’s term for hedging one’s bets
while painting. And bumping up the
size helps prevent Wylie’s images from
being read as twee or merely eccentric,
which can be a problem when working
at a smaller scale. Some of her images—
tree bark, a spider, a leaf—convey the
Rose Wylie/David Zwirner
pleasure of looking at things under a
microscope. The spider imagery even
extends to the rendering of human
forms: one of Wylie’s more hilarious
inventions is a facedown figure viewed
from above, like a swimmer in the
water or a baby crawling on the floor.
This bird’s- eye view—combined with
Wylie’s disinclination to draw hands
and feet, and the cocked or flexed arms
and legs that end in pointed stumps—
amplifies the arachnoid metaphor.
One painting in particular will ex-
emplify what I mean. At more than ten
feet long, I Like To Be (2020; see illus-
tration on page 32) shows two female
figures facedown in water. The one
near the top edge is engaged in some
sort of breaststroke, limbs bent like
the legs of a crab, the bottom of her
bathing suit poufing out like a baby’s
diaper, her thick black lines of coiled
hair semi-floating in the green, foamy
water. Her body, outlined in viscous
strokes of carmine-red oil paint, could
be a bathing-suit-wearing crustacean:
there she floats, oblivious to our gaze.
The lower bather, also face- down, is
cropped in half by the canvas’s bot-
tom edge, and her body is fantastically
elongated, stretching across the the
painting’s entire width, her mass of
black hair surging improbably forward,
while her right arm, disproportion-
ately shrunken, is cut off at the point
at which it plunges into the water. It’s
the image we have in the mind’s eye
as we push away from the wall of the
pool, arms outstretched before us as we
glide through the water—the sensation
of the streamlined body getting lon-
ger. Two swimmers facedown in a wide
green sea, one half crab and the other
mostly squid, poised amid the hori-
zontal brushstrokes of sea-foam green,
with I LIKE TO BE in chunky black let-
ters giving voice to the emotion. It’s a
thrilling picture; I’m tempted to have
the words tattooed on my biceps.
W ylie is also a sophisticated colorist.
The pale ocher color of the raw cotton
canvas that she uses is a constant, and
other colors show up fabulously against
it. Many of her paintings feature a won-
derful harmony of sugary pink, cad-
mium red light, plus pale lemon yellow,
raw sienna, or yellow ocher, and she is
partial to a green so minty it’s almost ar-
omatic. Colors are not often blended—
once a color is mixed, it’s used as itself,
defending its territory against incur-
sions. Sometimes a cobalt or ultrama-
rine blue will be mixed with white and
slathered on the canvas in close-packed
horizontal strokes, like sardines in a tin,
and white itself is frequently used for
backgrounds or for punctuation. Wylie
is a connoisseur of yellow—a notori-
ously difficult color to use—deploying
it for figures, hair, or dresses, edging it
most often with cadmium red, but also
with cadmium green, or turquoise, or
brownish black. Wylie puts more yellows
to work than any painter since Baselitz.
The Zwirner show contained one of
the weirdest paintings I’ve seen in years:
Illuminated Manuscript, Adam and Eve
(2020). A medium-sized vertical canvas
is bisected by an ocher- colored tree
flanked by a female figure on the left and
a male figure on the right. This is Adam
and Eve as you’ve never seen them be-
fore: Eve is roughly the shape of a car-
rot, with a face like Popeye’s and what
looks like a shower cap on her shrunken
head. A pair of breasts flaccidly descend
to meet two shoulder-less Gumby arms.
Adam has broad shoulders but the same
rubbery arms, one of which ends in an
upturned hand that resembles an ele-
phant’s trunk. Both figures are painted
in the same raw sienna as the tree, with
a little darker ocher here and there, and
all are outlined in a dark red. Where the
genitals—or fig leaves, in the medieval
renditions—would be, Wylie has sup-
plied broad swaths of pale yellow paint
applied in vigorously clumsy strokes, as
if she’s scrubbing a floor, and the same
yellow paint wraps itself diagonally
around the tree, becoming a de facto
yellow serpent.
Across the painting’s top edge,
heavy, blocky letters of a dark cadmium
green spell the words HISTORY NO,
with the same color used for the names
of the protagonists in smaller type along
the painting’s lower edge. As if all this
was not enough arbitrariness, Wylie
adds two parallel lines of the same dark
red to form a border around three sides
of the canvas, rounding off to an arc be-
fore exiting at the top. I haven’t seen a
painting this unhinged from the conven-
tional in a long time. It sends up pretty
much every piety there is while being
shamelessly stylish at the same time—
beauty strictly on its own terms. Q
The New York Review
 What Solzhenitsyn Understood
March 1917:
The Red Wheel/Node III
(8 March–31 March): Book 3
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
translated from the Russian
by Marian Schwartz.
University of Notre Dame Press,
684 pp., $42.00
Between Two Millstones:
Book 2, Exile in America,
1978–1994
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
translated from the Russian
by Clare Kitson
and Melanie Moore,
and with a foreword by
Daniel J. Mahoney.
University of Notre Dame Press,
559 pp., $39.00
For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, no
literary form was ever sufficiently
capacious. Three gargantuan
works dominated his creative
life. The Gulag Archipelago: An
Experiment in Literary Investi-
gation, on which his reputation
mainly rests, chronicles in three
volumes the history of Soviet
forced labor camps. It earned
him the Nobel Prize in Liter-
ature in 1970 and forced exile
from the Soviet Union in 1974,
the first official expulsion since
Leon Trotsky had been deported
to Turkey in 1929. Solzheni-
tsyn himself regarded The Red
Wheel, a series of novels about
the Russian Revolution, as his major
contribution to literature. These novels
posed a question: Why and how did the
unprecedented horror described in The
Gulag Archipelago occur? The answers
Solzhenitsyn arrived at shaped his third
great project, four volumes of memoirs.
The Red Wheel is divided into four
“nodes,”1 some of which contain more
than one volume; each node focuses
on a specific short period encapsulat-
ing important events that led to the ca-
tastrophe of Bolshevik rule. The first
two nodes, August 1914 and November
1916, superb works that overflow the
conventional form of historical novels,
are followed by four long volumes de-
voted to the third node, March 1917,
which recounts events from March 8 to
March 31, 1917. The final node, April
1917, still untranslated, encompasses
two more volumes. The third volume
of March 1917, now available in an ex-
ceptionally fine rendition by Marian
Schwartz, is especially riveting. It makes
a splendid companion to the last volume
of Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs, the recently
translated second part of Between Two
Millstones, which casts the Gorbachev
years as an eerie repeat of 1917.
Taken together, the two volumes
of Between Two Millstones describe
Solzhenitsyn’s life from the time he
was expelled from the USSR until his
return in 1994. (After considering sev-
1 ger, the cultivation of the soul de-
The Russian word was previously
rendered as “knot” in H.T. Willetts’s
translations of August 1914 and Octo-
ber 1916 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1989 and 1999). Both mathematical
terms refer to a point on a continuous
line.
May 12, 2022
Gary Saul Morson
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; illustration by Seth
eral places in Europe and North Amer-
ica, he eventually settled in Cavendish,
Vermont, which reminded him of Rus-
sia and which afforded the isolation
needed to work on The Red Wheel.)
The title Between Two Millstones refers
primarily to the surprising hostility to,
and absurd mischaracterization of, his
views that the author faced in the West.
The same intellectual and press circles
that had celebrated his courage when
he was in the USSR now often became
relentless critics because, Solzhenitsyn
explains, he did not share conventional
American left-leaning ideas but in-
stead held positions that did not fit ex-
isting Western categories. He therefore
found himself caught between Soviet
and Western “millstones,” both vilify-
ing him and attributing to him excori-
ating opinions he did not hold.
Solzhenitsyn identified in West-
ern intellectual circles the same smug
narrow-mindedness that he had discov-
ered in liberal Russian intellectuals be-
fore the revolution. The core moment
in these volumes occurs when, as Sol-
zhenitsyn writes,
a leading [Canadian] television
commentator lectured me that I
presumed to judge the experience of
the world from the viewpoint of my
own limited Soviet and prison-camp
experience. Indeed, how true! Life
and death, imprisonment and hun-
spite the captivity of the body: how
very limited that is compared to
the bright world of political parties,
yesterday’s numbers on the stock
exchange, amusements without end,
and exotic foreign travel!
Solzhenitsyn had himself once cel-
ebrated the Russian liberals and
socialists who ran the Provisional Gov-
ernment overthrown by the Bolsheviks,
but Western archives—and perhaps
his encounters with Westerners—led
him to an entirely different view. The
members of the Provisional Govern-
ment and their supporters were so in-
competent, self-satisfied, and willing to
suppress any insufficiently progressive
opinion that tyranny was bound to tri-
umph. Solzhenitsyn detected the same
mindset among liberal Russian reform-
ers in the 1990s and feared another de-
scent into authoritarian rule.
T here were two Russian revolutions
in 1917. In February (March by pres-
ent reckoning) Tsar Nicholas II, one of
the most foolish people ever to occupy
a throne, abdicated. Mob violence,
greeted by the educated with the naive
ecstasy of “February fever,” unleashed
the chaos that allowed the Bolsheviks
to seize power in October (now Novem-
ber). Unlike the tsar or the Provisional
Government that succeeded him, Le-
nin’s party did not hesitate to use ex-
treme violence. The infamous Cheka
(secret police, ancestor of the NKVD,
OGPU, and KGB) was in operation be-
fore 1917 was over. The weaklings of
the Duma proved as strategically inept
as Lenin was brilliant.
Not all intellectuals allowed the ex-
citement of revolution to blind them.
In the recently translated volume of
the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s in-
terviews with the critic Victor Duvakin
in 1973, Bakhtin recalled his reaction
to the February revolution. Since it
was still dangerous to express
such views, he asked Duvakin
not to record them, but Duvakin
published Bakhtin’s comments
anyway:
BAKHTIN : I’ll tell you this,
but there’s no need to record
it . . .
DUVAKIN : We can erase it
later. . . . Or we don’t have to
transcribe it, if you prefer.
BAKHTIN : I did not welcome
the February Revolution. I
thought, or I should say in my
circle we believed that it’ll all
certainly end very badly. We
knew well, by the way, the
leaders . . . of the February
Revolution. . . . We were of the
opinion that all those intellec-
tuals were utterly incompetent
to govern, they were incompe-
tent to defend the February
Revolution. . . . So, inevitably,
the extreme left, the Bolshe-
viks would take over.2
The wisest fictional charac-
ters of March 1917 appreciate
what is really going on: during a
world war, with German armies
advancing rapidly into Russian
territory, revolutionaries were
calling on soldiers to murder
their officers. Mobs looted and
killed as work came to a stand-
still. Such a power vacuum invited the
most ruthless organized group to seize
power. Solzhenitsyn imagines Lenin
thinking, “There was a void in Peters-
burg . . . that was suckingly waiting, call-
ing for—his force.”
Anarchy, starvation, and invasion
loom, but the word “revolution” blinds
most intellectuals. “Revolution! There
was, after all, something attractive
and inviting in that sound,” they think.
“Revolution! The music of the mo-
ment!” “Universal brotherhood was
now coming!” Instead of seeing reality,
these intellectuals imagine themselves
strutting on the stage of History. “How
could you not light up at the thought
that you were taking part in Russia’s
moments of greatness!” the third vol-
ume of March 1917 begins. “This mo-
ment—dreamed of, longed for, by so
many generations of the Russian in-
telligentsia . . . here it had come.” Al-
most everyone views events through
a haze of romanticized parallels with
the French Revolution. We must seize
our Bastille, they feel, but what is it?
Play “The Marseillaise”! Ludicrously,
Mikhail Rodzyanko, the president of
the Duma, decides that the revolution
has gone far enough, and now must
stop. But what is to stop it?
T he novel’s fictional heroine, the his-
torian Olda Andozerskaya, recognizes
2
Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Inter-
views, 1973, edited by Slav N. Gratchev
and Margarita Marinova, and trans-
lated by Margarita Marinova (Bucknell
University Press, 2019), pp. 106.
35
the radical difference between reality
and newspaper accounts:
Every Petersburger had seen the
revolution with his own eyes. But
with the first newspaper page
they were told about something
quite different. There were vague
mentions of “excesses” and “an-
archy.”. . . Everyone knew that sol-
diers were going from apartment
to apartment and stealing, but the
newspapers wrote: “thieves and
hooligans dressed as soldiers”—as
if hooligans were some known so-
cial class, or it was so easy for lots
of people to dress as soldiers.
Having proclaimed “the Revolution”
bloodless, newspaper accounts even
referred to the thousands of executed
people “as ‘deceased’ rather than
killed.”
“The lie became the principle of
newspapers starting from the very
first day of this unchecked freedom,”
Andozerskaya reflects. When they re-
ported that arrested officers—recently
regarded as war heroes—had been
magnanimously allowed to receive a
bed in prison and food from home, it
really meant that they weren’t being
fed or given a place to sleep. Jour-
nalists and intellectuals had long de-
manded freedom of the press but now
suppressed any publication deemed in-
sufficiently radical.
In each Red Wheel novel, Solzheni-
tsyn explores the mentality leading ed-
ucated people to conform to prevailing
opinion even when it contradicts their
most cherished principles. Before the
revolution, Andozerskaya shocked her
students by saying that a historian writes
the truth even when it does not support
progressive opinion. Now she reflects:
The newspapers were disgusting,
yes, but that was because they
spewed society’s vile epidemic: the
fear of standing out from every-
one else. . . . Now that the “police
inspector was gone” and “we can
breathe,” people’s greatest fear
was standing out from everyone
else. . . . The dictatorship of the
current.
Lenin supposedly remarked that
“when we are ready to hang the capi-
talists, they will sell us the rope,” but
in Solzhenitsyn’s (generally accurate)
account, capitalists were even more
self-destructive. Wealthy businessmen
and other well-placed people destined
to be shot implored bloodthirsty revolu-
tionaries to accept sizable cash contri-
butions. Liberal generals and admirals,
who immediately proclaimed their al-
legiance to the revolution and the new
Provisional Government, were lynched
anyway. Solzhenitsyn describes their
pathetic confusion. Meanwhile Nicho-
las II, whom Solzhenitsyn portrays as
a softhearted idiot, reasons that “in
[good] weather like this, no evil deed
could take place. God would not allow
it.” Only Bolsheviks grasp “the unusual
nature of revolutionary situations” and
the dynamics of power.
Almost without exception, the mem-
bers of the Provisional Government
could do no more than assume revo-
lutionary poses and make speeches
inspiring to intellectuals but beyond
the comprehension of workers and sol-
diers. The “paramount principle” to
which Prince Lvov, the first head of the
36
Provisional Government, adheres “was October was a continuous process and fictional heroes, all interspersed with
belief and trust. Belief in people, all Bolshevism its natural outcome. The newspaper extracts, a chapter of “Frag-
people, our holy people.” To the sug- Red Wheel, he decided, would narrate ments from the day,” and the attempt
gestion that police should put a limit to “the inglorious, six-month-long story of of Tolstoy’s former secretary to inter-
anarchy and murder, he replies, “Why how the ‘victorious’ democracy (fabri- vene on behalf of imprisoned sectari-
does a free state need police at all?” cated, in Russia, by the educated types) ans. One brief chapter depicts what the
Lvov recoils at the very idea of resolute foundered, helpless, of its own accord.” table of contents describes as “a new
action. “Ah, ‘decisive measures,’ that’s Solzhenitsyn wanted to leave read- daily life for the Executive Committee
not our language,” he thinks, “it is un- ers with little alternative to accepting [of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’
worthy of a free alliance of free people. his conclusions. He wanted “to pro- Deputies].—The Romanov dynasty’s
My dear fellows, why so ominous?” vide proof, rather than impressionistic fate.—Start the Streetcars.” If this is
The radical Aleksandr Kerensky, daubs, which convince no one. A his- difficult for the reader to follow, it was
intoxicated by his own voice, supposes torical epic is not some diversion for the even harder for actual participants in
he can defeat anarchy and Bolshevism pen—it only has substance if it is truth- the events.
by sheer charisma. Only Vladimir ful all the way through.” He therefore One newspaper instructed:
Nabokov, the progressive politician included important documents in the
(and father of the novelist) who was text. Several chapters consist entirely Naïve people fear that with the
murdered by monarchists in 1922 in of actual newspaper extracts. The result elimination of the monarchy,
Berlin, acts competently. He wonders was a work of immense length and for- Russia’s state unity might falter.
that his colleagues “had no idea how to mal idiosyncrasy unprecedented even But it is free political institutions
operate, how to translate thoughts and in the Russian tradition of formally that will strengthen Russian state
votes into legislation. . . . A decision idiosyncratic works. Solzhenitsyn em- unity. The new government arose
was approved before it had any text, ployed structural anomaly not as an not through self-appointment: on it
unaccompanied by any figures or bud- end in itself, as the Russian Formalists rests the will of the people.
get,” and orders were given that made had advocated, but to convey the direct
no sense or could not be implemented. sense of what was really happening. Every one of these statements proved
Politicians neglected “the most funda- Most historians trace a coherent nar- false. Another newspaper reported:
mental act,” establishing their author- rative of past events, but Solzhenitsyn
ity in the provinces. renders the confusing impressions of More than 800 prisoners were re-
participants who had no idea where leased from the local prison (two
events were leading and pieced to- of them politicals, the rest crimi-
Solzhenitsyn writes so harshly about gether scraps of shifting evidence and nals). Immediately upon release . . .
the liberal Kadets (Constitutional unreliable information. To portray the the courthouse was burned to the
Democrats) and non-Bolshevik so- historical process, Solzhenitsyn ex- ground. . . . Pogroms, robberies,
cialists of the Provisional Government plains in Between Two Millstones, one and murders rained down on the
because he himself had adhered to the must render “the color of the succes- entire city.
common assumption—still predomi- sive, changeable, momentary opinions”
nant in the West—that the February and perceptions. Hundreds of short A newspaper in the city of Tver de-
revolution represented Russia’s great chapters, shifting between historical scribed how the governor, seeing a
hope instead of a stage leading directly and fictional figures, convey the throb mob heading for his house, phoned the
to Bolshevism. He began writing The of events almost hour by hour. bishop to make confession. One so-
Red Wheel, he explains in Between The section in the third volume of cialist newspaper published a curious
Two Millstones, under the spell of March 1917 devoted to Friday, March “appeal”:
such ideas, “and they were scattered 16, for instance, includes chapters 354
throughout [his novel] First Circle, for to 407. Scenes shift quickly between Comrade thieves, wheeler- dealers,
example, and the first edition of Archi- the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich robbers, picklocks, swindlers, black-
pelago.” It was only in the mid-1970s, and other generals and telegraph and mailers, double-dealers, sots, ma-
when he consulted archives preserved railway employees, fictional charac- rauders, pickpockets, cat burglars,
in the West, that he recognized his ters representing types of people com- vagrants, and other brethren . . . we
mistake. The slide from February to mon at the time, and the novel’s main have to meet in order to choose rep-
resentatives to the Soviet of Work-
ers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies . . . Unite,
comrades, for in unity is strength!. . .
[Signed] Group of conscientious
businessmen.
Solzhenitsyn also includes what he
IN NATURE calls “screens”: directions for how
a scene might be filmed. Frame by
I can think, but rarely of nature. frame, chapter 418 depicts how a mob
I look with my back to the landscape, murders the surprised liberal admiral
As if in a Claude glass. Adrian Nepenin (“He hadn’t expected
this treatment!”). The equal sign, Sol-
zhenitsyn explains, means “cut to”:
A cheat code. Ninety-nine lives,
Which might as well be infinite The whole time we see up ahead—
Unless this isn’t the first one? we see large and up close the ad-
miral’s face,
Nietzsche said There’s a rollicking kindness not yet disenchanted even now,
That looks like malice. how he trusted and hoped.
I ascribe that “kindness” to fate. But there, behind, sailor hands
are pushing officers aside,
A breeze carries unknown pathogens, dragging them off. . . .
Information that can’t want to die = Trampled snow on the street
down which they are leading
Because it’s not alive.
= the admiral with the lively,
open face, who so believed in
What it wants is desire. these heroes in black.
A barrier to crossing
The chasm of the day.
Yet another perspective appears in the
—Elisa Gabbert brief proverbs and sayings Solzhenitsyn
places in large print between chapters
to evoke folk wisdom that’s beyond the
reach of the participants: “FOR THE
TSAR’S SIN GOD WILL PUNISH THE
ENTIRE LAND”; “SOMEONE ELSE’S
FOOL IS A JOKE, YOUR OWN FOOL
The New York Review
A CALAMITY.” Solzhenitsyn grasped
that this piling on of evidence taxes
readers’ patience: “And yes, I do under-
stand that I am overloading the Wheel
with detailed historical material—but
it is that very material that’s needed for
categorical proof; and I’d never taken
a vow of fidelity to the novel form.”
This comment recalls Tolstoy’s expla-
nation about the formal oddities of
War and Peace, which contains docu-
ments, a map, and nonfictional essays.
Like March 1917, it depicts events not
according to an overall narrative but
in all the confusing immediacy with
which they were experienced. “What
is War and Peace?” Tolstoy famously
asked in his essay “Some Words About
the Book War and Peace”:
It is not a novel, even less is it a
poem, and still less a historical
chronicle. War and Peace is what
the author wished to express and
was able to express in that form
in which it is expressed. Such an
announcement of disregard of
conventional form in an artistic
production might seem presump-
tuous. . . . But the history of Rus-
sian literature since the time of
Pushkin not only affords many
examples of such deviation from
European forms but does not offer
a single example of the contrary.
From Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dos-
toevsky’s Dead House . . . there is
not a single artistic prose work ris-
ing at all above mediocrity, which
quite fits into the form of a novel,
epic, or story.
Such unconventionality itself became
a conventional mark of Russianness,
a sort of literary patriotism. Russians
wrote what Henry James called “large,
loose, baggy monsters” because of
their conviction that “truth” was more
important than harmonious form.
All the same, Solzhenitsyn consid-
ered his differences from Tolstoy more
important than any similarities. Au-
gust 1914, the first novel of The Red
Wheel, begins with the fictional Sanya
questioning Tolstoy about his uncom-
promising pacifism and his insistence
that love is the only proper response to
evil. “But are you sure . . . that you don’t
exaggerate the power of human love?”
Sanya asks.
You say . . . that evil does not come
from an evil nature . . . but out of
ignorance. . . . But . . . it isn’t at all
like that, Lev Nikolaevich, it just
isn’t so! Evil refuses to know the
truth. . . . Evil people usually know
better than anybody else just what
they are doing. And go on doing it.
The novels to follow, especially when
depicting Lenin and the Bolsheviks,
illustrate how right Sanya is. Nicholas
II, the Provisional Government, and
even the generals refuse to use force,
“just so there is no bloodshed,” they
think. The main reason the Bolshe-
viks won was precisely that they took
advantage of this tenderheartedness.
The essays concluding War and Peace
outline a determinist theory of history
at odds with the book’s preceding nar-
rative. Both the essays and the narra-
tive itself reject the view that “great
men” affect historical events, whose
outcomes actually depend on the hun-
dred million imperceptible decisions
of ordinary people. Solzhenitsyn, for
May 12, 2022
his part, rejects both deterministic and
“great man” views of history. Time
and again, he shows us characters who
recognize that if only generals had de-
ployed military units early enough, the
slide toward Bolshevism could have
been arrested. Far from inevitable,
the outcome of the revolution resulted
from the cowardice and indecisiveness
of crucial leaders. That is why so much
of March 1917 is devoted to tracing how
people in authority think and react (or
fail to react) to events.
Indeed, Solzhenitsyn argues, the tsar’s
most able minister, Pyotr Stolypin,
had almost reversed the trend to rev-
olution with a series of far-reaching
reforms, which included making peas-
ants into proprietors who could own
land individually, not just as members
of a traditional peasant commune
(obshchina). His assassination in 1911
by the terrorist (and possible double
agent) Dmitri Bogrov diverted Russia
from peace, prosperity, and the grad-
ual extension of individual rights and
respect for the rule of law. So import-
ant is Stolypin’s career, which took
place before the beginning of The Red
Wheel, that August 1914 includes a
two-hundred-page flashback (in a sec-
tion labeled “From Previous Knots”)
about his career and death. The pru-
dent but decisive Stolypin represented
the Russia that might have been.
A patriot opposed to Russian impe-
rialism and glorification of war, Sol-
zhenitsyn eluded the usual categories
of Russian or Western thought. His
enemies therefore found it easy to as-
sign him to one or another disreputable
outlook that was more familiar. Those
enemies included the KGB, liberal Rus-
sian émigrés like the writer Andrei
Sinyavsky and the scholar Efim Etkind,
extreme Russian nationalists, liberal
Western journalists and intellectuals,
and most members of my own profes-
sion, whom Solzhenitsyn disparages as
“Slavists.”
In his foreword to the second volume
of Between Two Millstones, which fo-
cuses on the book’s most controversial
arguments, Daniel J. Mahoney—gen-
erally regarded as the world’s greatest
Solzhenitsyn scholar—observes that
absurd and contradictory charges were
leveled at Solzhenitsyn. On the one
hand, a Russian émigré journal ac-
cused him of “selling out to the Jews,”
and a Russian publisher based in Lon-
don insinuated he was really the Jew
“Solzhenitsker.” On the other, the Jew-
ish magazine Midstream called August
1914 a new Protocols of the Elders of
Zion. Despite his exposure of Soviet
forced labor camps in Gulag Archipel-
ago, he was pronounced “an ally of the
Kremlin,” perhaps even a secret agent.
Solzhenitsyn recalled that the émigré
Lev Kopelev called him “the leader of
a ruthless party” devoted to
extreme Russian nationalism . . .
more terrifying than Bolshevism.
Kopelev went on to conflate me
even with Stalin and the Ayatol-
lah Khomeini, while “member of
the [ultranationalist and violently
anti- Semitic] Black Hundreds,
monarchist, theocrat” were some
of his mildest monikers.
Few Westerners regarded Solzheni-
tsyn as a Bolshevik agent, but many
believed that his nationalism entailed
imperialist and anti-Semitic views.
After all, Solzhenitsyn considered
himself a patriot. He objected that
Westerners used the terms “Russian”
and “Soviet” as synonymous when,
in fact, “Russia and Communism had
the same relationship as a sick man
and his disease.” Solzhenitsyn’s think-
ing eluded received categories. Unlike
others who wanted to see Bolshevism
end, he rejected revolutionary violence
and insisted on gradual change. And
what sort of nationalist or imperialist
insists that his country should give up
its empire?
In Rebuilding Russia: Reflections
and Tentative Proposals (1991), for
instance, he implored Mikhail Gor-
bachev to grant the non-Slavic Soviet
republics their independence. Indeed,
if they didn’t want it, he insisted, Rus-
sia should secede from them. While
Russia should try to persuade other
Slavic republics to remain with Russia,
he argued, they, too, should be allowed
to leave without hindrance. Foreseeing
the conflicts likely to arise eventually
if Ukraine, with its large Russian-
speaking population and its close cul-
tural ties to Russia, chose to secede,
Solzhenitsyn, who considered himself
both Russian and Ukrainian, hoped to
preclude the devastating conflict we see
today. Far from wanting Russia to hold
on to territory, this patriot—uniquely,
so far as I know—even recommended
returning the disputed Kuril Islands to
Japan.
Nationalism, as we usually envisage
it, appalled him. “I note with alarm
that the awakening Russian self-
awareness has to a large extent been
unable to free itself of great-power
thinking and of imperial delusions,” he
warned his countrymen. “What a per-
nicious perversion of consciousness it is
to argue that we are a huge country ‘for
all that, and we are taken seriously ev-
erywhere.’” As Japan renounced impe-
rial ambitions and flourished, so should
Russia: “We must strive not for the ex-
pansion of the state, but for a clarity of
what remains of our spirit. By separat-
ing off twelve republics . . . Russia will
in fact free itself for a precious inner
development.”
Solzhenitsyn believed that during
the preceding hundred years the Rus-
sian national character had been cor-
rupted, and therefore the country’s
most important task must be spiritual
restoration. To Westerners unfamiliar
with the language of spirituality so im-
portant in Russian culture, all this talk
of renewing the soul seemed at best
woolly, at worst mere cover for theoc-
racy. The charge of anti-Semitism par-
ticularly offended Solzhenitsyn, who,
as some critics conceded, defended
Jewish dissidents and the right of Jews
to emigrate in order to avoid religious
and other persecution in the USSR.
Accusers relied primarily on passages
in August 1914 devoted to the assas-
sination of Stolypin by Bogrov, who
was Jewish. Since Stolypin had been
Russia’s best hope, some thought, Sol-
zhenitsyn must be blaming the Jews for
its terrible fate.
Having written about the scourge of
Russian anti-Semitism, I was puzzled
to hear that the Bogrov passages were
taken as proof by some Western crit-
ics of Solzhenitsyn’s hatred of Jews. I
knew this novel well and had discerned
no anti-Semitism. After these accusa-
tions were first made following the 1983
publication in Russian of the expanded
version of August 1914, Solzhenitsyn
demanded:
And what kind of reasoning is
this?—if Bogrov was a Jew, and
the death of Stolypin was a disas-
ter for Russia and made it easier to
start a revolution, then that means
Solzhenitsyn blames the Jews for
the 1917 revolution? In effect, they
are demanding the censorship of
history.
As Solzhenitsyn also observed, most
Westerners making this charge had
not even read the offending passages,
since the novel had not yet been trans-
lated. When The Washington Post,
which had published these accusations,
commissioned John Glad to translate
the passages suspected of being anti-
Semitic, it “was obliged to mention that
he had ‘found no grounds for accus-
ing [Solzhenitsyn] of anti-Semitism.’”
Still more telling, when a translation
of the expanded August 1914 finally
appeared, the accusers fell silent: “All
those critics seemed, in an instant, to
have lost their memory.”
Despite its relentless focus on political
events, The Red Wheel paradoxically
instructs that politics is not the most
important thing in life. To the contrary,
the main cause of political horror is the
overvaluing of politics itself. It is su-
premely dangerous to presume that if
only the right social system could be es-
tablished, life’s fundamental problems
would be resolved. Like the great real-
ist novelists of the nineteenth century,
Solzhenitsyn believed that, as he stated
in Rebuilding Russia,
political activity is by no means the
principal mode of human life. . . .
The more energetic the political
activity in a country, the greater
is the loss to spiritual life. Politics
must not swallow up all of a peo-
ple’s spiritual and creative ener-
gies. Beyond upholding its rights,
mankind must defend its soul.
In Between Two Millstones he re-
peated: “Political life is not life’s most
important aspect . . . a pure atmosphere
in society cannot be created by any jurid-
ical legislation, but by moral cleansing.”
Commenting on The Red Wheel, Sol-
zhenitsyn explains that “no matter what
depths of evil the narrative has plumbed,
this must not be allowed to warp the soul
of either author or reader—you must
arrive at a harmonious contemplation.”
The central passage of March 1917
concerns not a historical figure’s polit-
ical ruminations but the fictional Var-
sonofiev’s assessment of his life, with
all its irretrievable mistakes and erro-
neous judgments that seemed so right
at the time. Remembering his fervent
hopes for revolution and the republic
that would make life sublime, Varsono-
fiev now asks rhetorically:
What could the daily political fever
change for the better in the true
life of men? What kind of princi-
ples could it offer that would bring
us out of our emotional sufferings,
our emotional evil? Was the essence
of our life really political?. . . How
could you remake the world if you
couldn’t figure out your own soul?
Q
37

Gian Lorenzo Bernini: The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, circa 1614–1618
Bernini and His World:
Sculpture and Sculptors in
Early Modern Rome
by Livio Pestilli.
London: Lund Humphries,
288 pp., $99.99
In theory, early modern Italians re-
garded sculpture as a lower form of
art, harsh physical labor unsuited to a
gentleman. In fact, like their ancient
forebears, they found something irre-
sistibly magical about the people who
could draw forth life and form from
a block of stone, especially when that
stone was the extraordinary marble of
Carrara, famous since Roman times
as one of Italy’s greatest natural re-
sources. Composed primarily of cal-
cium carbonate compressed from the
bodies of countless ancient sea crea-
tures, Carrara marble, gleaming white
with veins of gray, has an unusually
fine, compact grain that allows a sculp-
tor to chip it away with an oblique blow
of the chisel, carve it in sharp detail,
polish it to a high sheen, and exploit its
unusual tensile strength to project del-
icate shapes boldly into space: the ten-
drils of a Corinthian column, the curls
of a lion’s mane, a fluttering mantle, the
legs and tail of a prancing horse.
Nothing could seem so uncannily
alive to viewers, ancient, medieval, and
early modern, as a marble statue. The
mythical Greek sculptor Pygmalion fell
so in love with his carved Galatea that
he transformed her into a living woman
by force of prayer, just as his crusty
Renaissance colleagues Donatello and
Michelangelo reputedly challenged
their own creations to speak, Do-
natello with a Tuscan imprecation, Mi-
chelangelo with a wistful “Why don’t
you talk?”1 The spell cast by sculpture
1
Giorgio Vasari’s Life of Donatello
reports that the artist told his statue
the Zuccone to “speak, speak, may a
38
The Spell of Marble
Ingrid D. Rowland
meant that a well-bred, well- educated
woman like Properzia de’ Rossi of Bo-
logna (circa 1490–1530) could progress
from carving tiny figures in cherry pits
to hewing full-scale projects in stone.
(So, too, the contemporary sculptor
Mother Praxedes Baxter O. S. B. puts
her hands to marble, bronze, and steel
in a full Benedictine habit.) Versatile
artists like Michelangelo, Gian Lo-
renzo Bernini, and Antonio Canova
based their immense artistic authority
on their skill with the lowly chisel.
Michelangelo, Bernini, and Canova
are sculptors so distinctive, and dis-
tinct from one another, that we rarely
think of them in company. What could
possibly connect the regal nudity of
Michelangelo’s David to the ectoplas-
mic drapery that swathes Bernini’s
Saint Theresa, or the deep emotions
bodied forth in these statues to the
saucy detachment of Canova’s Pauline
Borghese, Napoleon’s handful of a sis-
ter, lounging on a sculpted cushion so
lightly that she barely dents it, dressed
for conquest in nothing but a brace-
let and an artfully slipping wrap? For
one thing, all three sculptors share a
winning way with marmo statuario,
the most precious grade of marble
from Carrara. But the Roman art his-
torian Livio Pestilli argues that they
share a great deal more than that: all
three emerge from an artistic tradi-
tion rooted as deeply in philosophy
as in practice, as attentive to bodiless
bloody flux take you” (favella, favella,
che ti venga il cacasangue). The an-
ecdote about Michelangelo telling his
Moses to speak is first recorded in 1839;
see Giorgio Masi, “Perché non parli?:
Michelangelo e il silenzio,” in Officine
del nuovo. Sodalizi fra letterati, artisti
ed editori nella cultura italiana fra
Riforma e Controriforma, edited by
Harald Hendrix and Paolo Procaccioli
(Manziana, Italy: Vecchiarelli, 2008).
provided with a dowry in adulthood,
Uffizi Gallery, Florence/Art Resource
whether she married or entered a con-
vent as a “bride of Christ.”
Gian Lorenzo broke that sequence
on December 7, 1598, “in order to make
two centuries illustrious by his life,”
as his son and biographer Domenico
asserts, but also to ease his parents’
worries about making ends meet in the
future. In 1606 the still-growing family
moved to Rome, where Pietro bought
a five-story house near the basilica of
Santa Maria Maggiore, his new work-
place. Gian Lorenzo would live in that
dynastic stronghold, now Via Liberi-
ana 24, until 1642. For all practical pur-
poses, then, the younger Bernini was
a Roman, and would spend virtually
all except the first seven of his eighty-
one years in the Eternal City, but his
volcanic temper and his preternatural
energy linked him eternally in con-
temporaries’ minds to his birthplace.
If Michelangelo swore that he drank in
marble dust with his nursemaid’s milk,
the infant Bernini had clearly downed
the fires of Vesuvius.
For an aspiring New Michelangelo,
that persistent connection with Naples
was problematic. The north–south di-
vide that still splits Italy reflected the
seventeenth century’s political reality
as well as differences of language and
culture: the Kingdom of Naples, the
divinity as to the shaping of physical southern half of the Italian peninsula,
matter. was ruled by a Spanish viceroy, Rome
and the Papal States of central Italy
by a pope with the power to command
I n Bernini and His World, Pestilli in- armies, and Tuscany by a grand duke—
terprets “world” in a broad sense, to three radically different monarchs rul-
include the entire social and cultural ing radically different polities. With
universe of early modern artistry, a 250,000 inhabitants, Naples ranked as
universe in which the links between one of the world’s largest cities. Its mild
these three epochal creative spirits are climate permitted a huge population of
surprisingly direct. Bernini, a child indigents, called lazzaroni, to live on
prodigy, heard himself described from the streets, sustained by a wholesome
his earliest years as “the new Michel- diet of bread and fruit.
angelo” and cemented the comparison Pestilli traces Bernini’s repeated
not by imitating the great master but by attempts to assume his father’s (and
blazing his own path before he, in turn, Michelangelo’s) Tuscan heritage, or at
set a course for the young Canova. least to present himself as a scion of
(The book’s final chapter, on Bernini’s Rome, where the population of ancient
influence, breaks new ground in show- statues proverbially equaled the num-
ing how closely Canova studied the Ba- ber of living people, but those efforts
roque master.) Each artist earned his never really convinced anyone. Bernini
authority, according to this perceptive himself claimed that the only remnant
study, by claiming the freedom to do of his childhood in Naples was his vo-
things his own way. Their originality, racious love of fruit, but his contem-
as much as their technical skill, is what poraries knew better. The man and his
conferred on them the right, in the creations—his plays, his paintings, his
eyes of their contemporaries, to stand statues, his drawings, his caricatures,
among the giants of the past. his terra-cotta models, his tabletop min-
Gian Lorenzo’s father, Pietro iatures—all of them were pure theater.
(1562–1629), was a Florentine sculp- Even his sculpted animals bubble
tor trained in the immemorial Tuscan over with personality, from the an-
tradition that put drawing, disegno, at cient statue of a goat he supplied with
the heart of every artistic endeavor, a brand-new smiling head to his own
even the art of living, for disegno could inventions: the thirsty lion who bends
mean a strategy as well as a sketch. to drink the waters of the Nile on his
After apprenticeships as a sculptor in Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Pi-
Florence and as a painter in Rome (in azza Navona (the king of Spain has a
a studio that eventually included Ca- miniature replica of this beguiling cat
ravaggio), Pietro moved to Naples in in gilded bronze, standing on a little
1584, where he began an active career chip of porphyry); the same fountain’s
as a sculptor in his own right. In 1587, curly-lipped giant armadillo, the por-
rather abruptly, he married a twelve- trait of a real stuffed creature imported
year- old Neapolitan girl named An- by the Jesuits from Argentina; and the
gelica Galante, quite possibly because sturdy elephant in the Piazza della Mi-
she was already pregnant with the first ner va who balances an ancient Egyp-
of their thirteen children. In rapid suc- tian obelisk on his back as if it were the
cession, the young couple produced easiest feat in the world, smirking as he
five daughters, a matter of concern in shows his posterior to the Dominican
an era when each would have to be convent that commissioned him.
The New York Review
 Bernini used every trick, from steel
bars to stucco to a sculpted smile, to
make granite seem weightless, and mar-
ble as ductile as bronze. Pestilli, adapt-
ing Milan Kundera, playfully calls the
result “the bearable lightness of being.”
The artist’s personality was another mat-
ter. Nothing could contain Bernini’s
hot-blooded exuberance; when he was
thirty-eight, his mother complained in
a letter to Pope Urban VIII’s cardinal
nephew Francesco Barberini that her
son acted as if he were “master of the
world,” and she begged Barberini, the
second most powerful man in Rome,
for assistance in bringing him to heel.
So bottomless was Bernini’s energy
that everyone believed the story about
his swift recovery from a near disaster
in the studio: he had almost completed
a bust of his great patron Cardinal Sci-
pione Borghese when a hairline crack
appeared along its forehead. His biog-
rapher Filippo Baldinucci claims that
Bernini carved a whole new version in
only fifteen days, chiseling away in his
bedroom by night. Pestilli refutes the
tall tale with gusto, reminding read-
ers that elite sculptors, familiar with
marble’s vagaries, were almost always
prepared for this kind of mishap (and
indeed Bernini faced the same prob-
lem a decade later with a bust of Pope
Innocent X). Long before its execution
in stone, the bust had begun as a series
of preparatory drawings that led to
the creation of a full-size clay model.
Assistants would have prepared the
marble block for the master’s final de-
tailing, and only then would he have in-
tervened to give the work its definitive
personality. The fifteen- day miracle
was not a creation from scratch.
Furthermore, as Pestilli points out,
the design, the drawings, and the
model were just as much a part of the
master’s artistry as the final product.
In Bernini’s studio, on occasion, the as-
sistants might also do the detailing: the
leaves and roots that spring from Daph-
ne’s fingers and toes in Bernini’s Apollo
and Daphne, for instance, were done
by Giuliano Finelli, and not all of them
are made of marble. Rather than run
the risk of shattering stone, Finelli used
stucco to complete the laurel leaves and
the finest roots. For all his phenomenal
skill, Bernini recognized that Finelli
had the most delicate hand of all, and
for seven years, from 1622 to 1629, the
younger man was Bernini’s most valued
associate before striking out on his own.
In the case of Cardinal Scipione’s
bust, a spare block had probably been
prepared long before the crack ap-
peared in the original. Marble, even
marmo statuario, is an uneven me-
dium; traces of primordial silt and sand
in the calcium carbonate create charac-
teristic veins in varying shades of gray
or weak points and natural fissures in
the stone. Michelangelo was well along
with a statue of the Risen Christ when a
dark gray vein appeared at eye level in
the center of the figure’s face. He tried
to limit the damage, and thanks to his
skill Jesus exhibits nothing more than
a dark stripe alongside his nose, but
Michelangelo, unable to unsee the flaw,
carved a whole new statue, fine-tuning
its pose in the process.
Cardinal Scipione, to his immense
credit both as a friend of Bernini and
as a connoisseur of the artistic process,
kept both his portrait busts, the cracked
and the whole, displaying them in differ-
May 12, 2022
ent rooms of his suburban villa. Today
they stand side by side in the same space
at the Borghese Gallery, where we can
compare them directly with each other.
The cracked original is more finely
finished—Bernini completed the bust
despite the flaw in the marble and it
shows the effect of more concentrated,
meticulous work, but the second ver-
sion, created more hastily and along
simplified lines, radiates its own spon-
taneous charm. Both communicate the
cardinal’s jovial spirit through his smile
and the button that slips furtively out of
its buttonhole, as if the portly prelate is
bursting out of his cassock.
The fifteen- day bust is only one of
the tall tales told of Bernini by his en-
thusiastic biographers, a yarn genuinely
based on Bernini’s own experience—
we can see the evidence for ourselves.
Many of the other anecdotes, as Pestilli
reveals, are drawn not from life but
from literature, as a way of consecrat-
ing their Gian Lorenzo among the he-
roes of artistic legend and, in one case
at least, among the very saints. Accord-
ing to Domenico Bernini, the sculptor,
only eighteen,
wished to portray . . . Saint Law-
rence in the act of being burned
naked on the grill. In order to ad-
equately reflect in the saint’s face
the pain of his martyrdom and the
effect that the fire must have had
on his flesh, he placed his own leg
and bare thigh against burning
coals. . . . Even more meritoriously
than the ancient Scaevola, who
placed his hand in fire in order to
punish himself for having erred,
our Gian Lorenzo caused his own
flesh to be burned out of a desire
not to fall into error.
None of the artist’s other biogra-
phers tell the story, and Pestilli points
out that the statue—now in the Uffizi
in Florence—shows Lawrence with a
body contorted by pain but a face al-
ready enraptured by visions of Heaven.
But the anecdote allows the scholarly
Domenico to invoke a series of state-
ments about artists and verisimilitude
from authors ancient and modern: Ar-
istotle, Seneca, Quintilian, Dante, right
up to the saintly seventeenth-century
cardinal Federico Borromeo. Bernini
clearly did make faces in a mirror to
prepare for his screaming Damned Soul
and the David who bites his lip in con-
centration, but grimacing for art’s sake
can hardly compare with suffering the
ordeal of burning coals to share in the
martyrdom of one’s own patron saint.
I t is no wonder that Domenico Ber-
nini became such a scholar. His father
amassed a library of four hundred
books (their titles carefully cataloged
and analyzed by Sarah McPhee2), a
number surpassed in his own day only
by his inveterate rival Francesco Bor-
romini and by the supremely suave
Peter Paul Rubens.
Bernini was distinctive among
Rome’s courtiers for his resolute inde-
pendence. With patrons that included
kings, popes, and cardinals, he moved
in society’s highest circles. He was
never one of them, but in a society that
so often turned upon flattery, he never
2
Sarah McPhee, “Bernini’s Books,”
The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 142,
No. 1,168 (July 2000).
stooped. When he walked in the Vatican
gardens with Pope Alexander VII, who
dressed down for the occasion in a dou-
blet and hose of white satin, they con-
cocted architectural plans together on DAVID LEVINE’S
the pages of the same sketchbook, which
CELEBRATED CARICATURES
still survives in the Vatican Library as
Manuscript Chigi a.I.18. Although the
handwriting of the two is distinct, it is
not always clear who drew which line,
the record of an intimate collabora-
tion. One day, another of Rome’s most
colorful residents, Queen Christina of
Sweden, knocked unannounced on Ber-
nini’s door. Rather than dress to meet
the queen, he appeared in the rough
apron he wore when he was carving.
And yet Bernini was a careful and
prudent dresser. Across the decades, DAVID LEVINE AUTHOR MUG
his portraits show him consistently in Caricatures by world-renowned artist David
black with a flat white linen collar: sim- Levine enriched and enlivened the pages of
ple, elegant attire. Other artists, like The New York Review of Books for almost
his father’s (and Caravaggio’s) onetime five decades. Thirty-three of Levine’s most
master Giuseppe Cesari, the notoriously arresting and iconic caricatures of authors
vain Cavalier of Arpino, wore flat col- decorate this heirloom quality bone china
lars trimmed in elaborate lace, and he mug, including the artist’s self-portrait. Each
never appeared without the gold chain time you pick up one of these mugs, you’ll
of high knighthood. A dandy like the find more to look at in the wonderfully
papal nephew Camillo Pamphilj would detailed illustrations which express the wit,
wear a ruff made of yard upon yard of commentary, and virtuoso technique for
expensive lace. Bernini, for all his co- which Levine’s caricatures received world-
lossal ego, never displayed that kind of wide acclaim.
vanity, but he also let people visit his Authors depicted are:
studio only by appointment, so he could Zora Neale Hurston, William Shakespeare,
be seen working in gentlemanly gear. James Joyce, Beatrix Potter, Frederick
Queen Christina’s unannounced ap- Douglass, Walt Whitman, Vladimir
pearance was an annoying break of pro- Nabokov, William Faulkner, James
tocol, but Pestilli shows how masterfully Baldwin, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde,
Bernini handled the situation: appear- Colette, Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf,
ing in his work clothes gave the queen a Voltaire, Rachel Carson, Samuel Beckett,
glimpse of his intimate life, a gesture of Herman Melville, Langston Hughes,
friendship to a woman as likely to dress Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote,
in men’s clothing as a silken gown. In Jane Austen, W. E. B. DuBois, M. F. K.
Rome’s elaborate social network, each Fisher, Victor Hugo, Gertrude Stein,
of them had carved out a unique place. Alice B. Toklas, Mary Wollstonecraft,
Pestilli’s final chapter, on Bernini’s Mary Shelley, Marcel Proust, Dante,
legacy, reveals the artist’s profound Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Lewis Carroll.
influence on Canova, who saw Apollo Hand wash only. Suitable for use in a micro-
and Daphne in 1780 at the age of wave. Size: 3.54" H (90mm) x 3.34" D (85mm).
twenty-three. In his diary he declared Capacity: 1.5 cups (350ml)
that the statue had been “sculpted with
#05-DLMUG • $27.95
such delicacy that it seems impossible
[to achieve], there are laurel leaves [ex-
ecuted] with wonderful workmanship
[and] the [rendition] of the beautiful
nude is beyond expectation.”
Pestilli also documents Bernini’s
lasting legacy to other artists with a
staggering array of color photographs,
many of which he took himself. He
records late-seventeenth- and early-
eighteenth- century sculptural mon-
uments preserved in some of Rome’s
most inaccessible churches: overlooked
gems like Bernardino Ludovisi’s pyra-
midal funerary monument to Cardinal
Giorgio Spinola in San Salvatore alle
Coppelle, or Lorenzo Ottoni’s theat-
rical balcony of a tomb for Antonio
and Girolama Publicola in their family
church, the intermittently accessible
Santa Maria in Publicolis. How did DAVID LEVINE AUTHOR NOTEBOOK
Pestilli get through all those perpetu- The same thirty-three Levine caricatures
ally closed doors? Most of us are lucky decorate this beautifully crafted hardcover
if we manage to sneak into two or three notebook, which includes a ribbon marker.
of them over the decades. Above all, he The cream paper is lined and suitable for
trains his observant eye on works from ballpoint, rollerball, and fountain pen ink
an era that has received comparatively (most fountain pens will not bleed through
little attention from either art histori- or feather as so often happens with cheaper
ans or tourists. After Bernini and His paper so both sides of the page may be used).
World, with its vast visual encyclopedia
Hardcover; 8.35" x 5.8" x 0.6"; 96 pages.
of Baroque sculpture in Rome, ignor-
ing these visual riches will be much #05-DLVAN • $19.95
harder to do—and why would anyone
Prices above do not include shipping and handling.
want to? But the real value of the book
is its magical mystery tour through the TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call
mind and art of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 646-215-2500 or email orders@nybooks.com.
Rome’s very own Vesuvius. Q
39
 The Hum of Humanity
Here and There: Sites of Philosophy
by Stanley Cavell,
edited by Nancy Bauer, Alice Crary,
and Sandra Laugier.
Harvard University Press,
326 pp., $29.95
Little Did I Know:
Excerpts from Memory
by Stanley Cavell.
Stanford University Press,
557 pp., $40.00
Why do certain experiences lodge in
our memories while others—more tri-
umphant perhaps, or more traumatic—
leave barely a trace? In his memoir,
Little Did I Know, the philosopher and
cultural critic Stanley Cavell records an
odd event from his childhood. His par-
ents—his mother was a gifted pianist
who played in vaudeville theaters and
accompanied silent films, his father a
Polish immigrant who worked in pawn-
shops and jewelry stores before the De-
pression—had embarked with Stanley,
their only child, on the first of three
failed attempts to establish a better life
in Sacramento, returning each time, in
defeat, to their home in Atlanta. Pok-
ing around a vacant lot behind a Sac-
ramento gas station, Cavell, nine years
old at the time, found a glass jar with a
rusted lid punched with holes, presum-
ably to keep fireflies from suffocating.
“I unscrewed the cap,” Cavell recalls,
and filled the jar with one of each
different thing or creature I came
across in the field, a twig, crum-
bling leaves, assorted bugs, various
kinds of stones, perhaps a marble,
a gum or candy wrapper, a soda
bottle cap, a piece of torn tennis
ball, to which I added a penny and
a duplicate stamp from my collec-
tion, enclosed in a folded envelope,
which I found in my pocket.
After stowing the jar beneath a clump
of trees, Cavell was surprised to hear
“a faint low hum as if produced by the
ground,” at a frequency he was con-
vinced he alone could hear.
“What,” Cavell wonders, “keeps
the memory of this small, isolated set
of events coming back, perhaps every
other year?” It’s a question that he
doesn’t fully answer. The jar and its
enigmatic contents may seem to sug-
gest a time capsule or, with envelope
and stamp, a message in a bottle to
Cavell’s future self. “If I say now that
I was burying my life,” he remarks,
“perhaps to preserve it for some time
in which it might be lived, or chosen, I
need not imply that these are thoughts
I could have formulated then.” But it’s
hard not to see the buried jar with its
mysterious hum as a metaphor for the
subterranean workings of memory
itself.
Unpacking such memories eventu-
ally acquired some urgency for Cavell.
Both Little Did I Know (first published
in 2010) and many of the twenty-five
relatively short essays (including trib-
utes to teachers and colleagues, re-
flections on psychoanalysis, and a
substantial clutch of writings on music)
gathered in the posthumous collection
Here and There reflect the increasingly
40
Christopher Benfey
Stanley Cavell; illustration by Oliver Munday
autobiographical turn in Cavell’s later
work, as though getting such memories
right might help elucidate his extraor-
dinarily varied philosophical interests.
Cavell, who died in 2018, was the
Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthet-
ics and the General Theory of Value
at Harvard from 1963 until his retire-
ment in 1997. Despite belonging to one
of the most prestigious philosophy de-
partments in the world, he cultivated a
posture of professional unease. “What
I do,” he remarked in a retrospective
essay in 1992, included in Here and
There, “has sometimes been denied the
title of philosophy, or deplored under
that title.” Cavell published dazzling
books on unorthodox philosophical
subjects ranging from Shakespearean
tragedy to Hollywood screwball com-
edies—a subset of which he identi-
fied, in Pursuits of Happiness (1981),
as “comedies of remarriage,” in which
women demand equal status with their
husbands. Beginning with The Senses
of Walden (1972), Cavell also sought
to promote his fellow mavericks Henry
David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo
Emerson—dismissed as intellectual
lightweights among his professorial
peers—as the towering founding fig-
ures of American philosophy. That
Friedrich Nietzsche was “pervasively
indebted” to Emerson was evidence
enough, in Cavell’s view, of Emerson’s
significance in modern philosophy.
The philosopher Richard Rorty
called Cavell “the least defended, the
gutsiest, the most vulnerable” of phi-
losophy professors. “He sticks his neck
out farther than any of the rest of us”
in questioning the foundations of phi-
losophy and the motivations of phi-
losophers. Recalling “the old saw that
philosophers kick up dust and then
complain that they cannot see,” Rorty
said that Cavell’s work asks:
What compels them to kick up all
that dust?. . . Why do philosophers
go in for skepticism? Why do they
ask whether the table is really
there, whether you might turn
out to be a robot, whether you see
what I see when we simultaneously
remark the deep vermilion in the
rose?
Cavell risked his reputation not only
in his adventurous scholarship, but in
his support of students demanding a
black studies program at Harvard in
1969. Five years earlier, he had partic-
ipated in the Freedom Summer drive
for voting rights, teaching at Tougaloo
College in Mississippi, which he called
a “transfiguring moment in my experi-
ence.” He was also a cofounder of the
Harvard Film Archive in 1979, at a time
when the academic study of film had a
low profile in American universities.
B orn Stanley Goldstein in Atlanta
in 1926—as a teenager he adopted an
Anglicized version of his family’s Pol-
ish name of Kavelieruskii—Cavell re-
sembled in certain ways his brilliant
contemporaries William H. Gass and
Susan Sontag. All three were trained in
academic philosophy during the 1950s,
the heyday of the rivalry between the
more humanistic “continental” phi-
losophy (centered in Germany and
France) and the more scientific “ana-
lytic” philosophy in the US and Great
Britain. All three came under the in-
fluence of “ordinary language” philos-
ophy, the conviction, derived from the
Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin and
the later phase of Ludwig Wittgen-
stein’s work, that a promising way to
address such traditional philosophical
problems as the nature of justice or
how we know that another person is in
pain is to examine the ways in which
we habitually talk about such things.
Gass studied briefly with Wittgenstein
at Cornell; Sontag attended Austin’s
lectures at Oxford; Cavell described
working with Austin at Harvard as a
“conversion experience.”
A deeper bond is that all three as-
piring philosophers were practicing
artists. Gass and Sontag wrote ambi-
tious fiction alongside their unortho-
dox philosophical treatments of, say,
the color blue (Gass) or photography
(Sontag). Cavell, by contrast, tried to
bring the arts into philosophy, not only
as a subject but as a mode of writing. “I
have wished to understand philosophy
not as a set of problems but as a set of
texts,” he wrote on the opening page
of his magisterial The Claim of Rea-
son, a book that incorporates much of
his Ph.D. dissertation on Wittgenstein.
In treating Wittgenstein and Austin,
Emerson and Thoreau, Nietzsche and
Martin Heidegger more as “creative
thinker[s]” than as solvers of prob-
lems, Cavell acknowledged, dryly, that
“both historians and non-historians
of the subject are given to suppose
otherwise.”
Music, which he considered “as old
among my cultural practices as read-
ing words or telling time,” was the art
form Cavell knew best, even as his own
musical life was laced with trauma:
he believed that his mother had given
up a concert career to raise him, and
the piano lessons he took as a child
were interrupted (as he revealed in
Little Did I Know) when he was sex-
ually molested by a male teacher. As
a teenager, he gravitated to the clar-
inet and saxophone, playing in swing
bands to make money. He enrolled
at Berkeley at sixteen to study music,
then pursued a degree in composition
at Juilliard, submitting with his appli-
cation a clarinet sonata and incidental
music for a campus production of King
Lear.
Changing his name—“declaring the
search for a life I could want, not merely
endure, in America”—was one step to-
ward independence; another was aban-
doning music. His original work “had
its moments,” he realized, “but on the
whole I did not love it; it said next to
nothing I could, or wished to, believe.”
In what he called “the major intellec-
tual, or spiritual, crisis of my life,” he
decided that his career as a musician
was over1:
1
The phrase is from “Reflections on
Wallace Stevens at Mount Holyoke.”
The essay was written at my invitation,
for a 2003 symposium commemorating
the sixtieth anniversary of the wartime
gatherings, known as “Pontigny- en-
Amérique,” when European artists
and intellectuals in exile met with their
American counterparts on the Mount
Holyoke College campus. Knowing
The New York Review
 And there came a late afternoon,
not more than six or seven weeks
after beginning classes for the
spring semester, an ending of the
Juilliard school day still turning
dark by six o’clock, on which I
formed the thought—I remem-
ber marking the moment by star-
ing upward, as I was standing on
a crowded Broadway bus headed
downtown after a late afternoon
class, at the chipped and scorched
plastic cover of one in the two rows
of lights extending the length of
the sides of the low ceiling of the
bus—that I would not be returning
to Juilliard.
Downtown meant the movie theaters
where Cavell was discovering an art
form he could believe in. The bus ride
as he describes it has a distinctly cine-
matic feel, like the bus that represents
freedom for a runaway bride in It
Happened One Night, one of the films
about personal declarations of inde-
pendence that he discussed in Pursuits
of Happiness.
After leaving Juilliard “a lost young
musician,” and combing through
Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psy-
choanalysis to try to find a way out of
his emotional crisis, Cavell returned to
California to resume his studies before
entering graduate school in philosophy
at Harvard. In the spring of 1955, he at-
tended Austin’s seminar on excuses (the
basis for Austin’s celebrated essay “A
Plea for Excuses”). Listening to Aus-
tin, who happened to be an amateur
violinist, tease out “the difference be-
tween doing something by mistake and
by accident and the difference between
a sheer or mere or pure or simple mis-
take or accident,” Cavell experienced
“a sense of revelation.”2 The intellectual
exercises in Austin’s classes, meant to
reveal the precision built into ordinary
that Cavell had studied with the com-
poser Roger Sessions, one of the orig-
inal Pontigny participants, I invited
him to draw on his own memories of
Sessions, which he charmingly did in
recalling a disaster averted when, with
Sessions conducting his first opera,
The Trial of Lucullus, set to a Bertolt
Brecht text, Cavell “overcame a crisis
in the middle of the opening night’s
performance, transposing an English
horn solo on the clarinet when the
English horn suddenly broke down.”
Cavell’s essay on Stevens, another Pon-
tigny participant, turns on the theme of
anticipation in Stevens’s work, with a
nod toward Thoreau. Stevens’s famous
poem “Anecdote of the Jar” is in the
background, I believe, of his own anec-
dote of a buried jar.
2 the interpretive energies he was look-
A famous footnote from “A Plea for
Excuses” turns on this distinction:
“You have a donkey, so have I, and they
graze in the same field. The day comes
when I conceive a dislike for mine. I go
to shoot it, draw a bead on it, fire: the
brute falls in its tracks. I inspect the
victim, and find to my horror that it is
your donkey. I appear on your door-
step with the remains and say—what?
‘I say, old sport, I’m awfully sorry, etc.,
I’ve shot your donkey by accident’? Or
‘by mistake’? Then again, I go to shoot
my donkey as before, draw a bead on
it, fire—but as I do so, the beasts move,
and to my horror yours falls. Again the
scene on the doorstep—what do I say?
‘By mistake’? Or ‘by accident’?”
May 12, 2022
spoken language, “acquired the serious-
ness and playfulness—the continuous
mutuality—that I had counted on in
musical performance.”
The ways that ordinary language can
shed light on our everyday lives struck
Cavell as having a particular relevance
for the arts. The music he had com-
posed for a Berkeley production of King
Lear paled for him when compared to
the expressive impact of Shakespeare’s
text, with Lear’s shocking demand for
proof of his daughters’ love. The re-
sult was Cavell’s landmark essay “The
Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King
Lear.” Cavell argued that certainty of
the kind that Lear, a mouthpiece for
skepticism, asks of his daughters, or
Othello of his wife, is not available in
human affairs, and that demands for
certainty lead inevitably to tragedy. As
an alternative, Cavell offered what he
called acknowledgment, our everyday,
trusting substitute for certainty. He
later summed up the distinction in an
aphorism: “The eye teaches skepticism;
the eyelid teaches faith.”
In essays on six of Shakespeare’s
plays, collected in Disowning Knowl-
edge (1987), Cavell took his prompt-
ings from the words on the page,
puzzling out the various ways in which
Shakespeare examined doubt and cer-
tainty. Cavell insisted that he was not
enlisting the plays as illustrations of
familiar philosophical ideas. “The mis-
understanding of my attitude that most
concerned me,” he wrote,
was to take my project as the ap-
plication of some philosophically
independent problematic of skep-
ticism to a fragmentary parade of
Shakespearean texts, impressing
those texts into the service of illus-
trating philosophical conclusions
known in advance.
In Cavell’s experience, this was pre-
cisely how philosophers tended to ap-
proach works of art. In Here and There,
he laments that the questions that “the
Anglo-American dispensation of phi-
losophy . . . characteristically addresses
to artistic entities neither arise from
nor are answered by passages of inter-
pretation of those entities.” In Little
Did I Know, he singles out John Dew-
ey’s Art as Experience as a typical ex-
ample of aesthetic cluelessness, asking
why “it so often seems that philosophi-
cal treatments of the fact and of objects
of art . . .were so often less interesting,
philosophically and aesthetically, than
the objects they were about.” The best
criticism should aspire to the status of
art, Cavell claimed: “Describing one’s
experience of art is itself a form of art.”
It was in the best film journalism
(James Agee, André Bazin) and in
the New Criticism that Cavell found
ing for. What literary critics like Wil-
liam Empson and Kenneth Burke were
doing, he wrote, “remained to my mind
incomparably more interesting, and in-
deed intellectually more accurate, than
the competing provisions of analytical
philosophy.” In a foreword (included
in Here and There) to a new edition of
Northrop Frye’s A Natural Perspective:
The Development of Shakespearean
Comedy and Romance, a decisive in-
fluence on his own work on comedies
of remarriage, Cavell recounts his first
encounter with Frye’s Anatomy of Crit-
icism, and his conviction—ultimately
disappointed—that Frye’s brilliant work
on literary genres and modes would
“have some unanticipated perspective
on those presentations of writing held to
do the work of philosophy.”
Cavell’s writing about art is grounded
in his sheer gratitude for its existence.
Calling it “a fruitful aesthetic tip,”
he quoted Wittgenstein’s injunction:
“Don’t take it as a matter of course, but
as a remarkable fact, that pictures and
fictitious narratives give us pleasure,
occupy our minds.” In an early essay on
atonal music, he stressed our intimacy
with works of art:
Objects of art not merely interest
and absorb, they move us; we are
not merely involved with them,
but concerned with them, and care
about them; we treat them in spe-
cial ways, invest them with a value
which normal people otherwise re-
serve only for other people—and
with the same kind of scorn and
outrage. They mean something to
us, not just the way statements do,
but the way people do.
Cavell rarely succumbed to scorn.
When he did, as in his withering assess-
ment of a scene in the film version of
Goodbye, Columbus, the context—in
this case the use of slow motion—was
often one of celebration:
It may not have needed Leni
Riefenstahl to discover the sheer
objective beauty in drifting a diver
through thin air, but her combina-
tion of that with a series of cuts syn-
copated on the rising arc of many
dives, against the sun, took inspi-
ration. . . . You’d think everybody
would have the trick in his bag by
now: for a fast touch of lyricism,
throw in a slow-motion shot of a
body in free fall. But as recently as
Goodbye Columbus, the trick was
blown: we are given slow motion of
Ali MacGraw swimming. But ordi-
nary swimming is already in slow
motion, and to slow it further and
indiscriminately only thickens it.
It’s about the only thing you can do
to good swimming to make it ugly.
Cavell wrote about film, theater,
television, literature, and photography.
Only rarely did he write about music,
the art form he knew best. And then—
after twenty years in which, as he put
it, he “avoided the issue,” presumably
because of the trauma associated with
quitting Juilliard—he suddenly took it
up again. “The group [of texts] whose
emergence most surprised me,” he
wrote in a draft preface for Here and
There in 2001, when he had tentatively
selected most of pieces included in the
volume, 3 “is that of the four pieces on
music.” These essays (a fifth was added
later) are short but they are not slight.
They aim to be “proposals,” “alterna-
tive routes of response” and “suggested
line[s] of investigation” for nothing less
than a new philosophy of music, “a way
to envision what a philosophy of music
should be, one which is itself illumi-
nated by musical procedure.”
What it shouldn’t be, Cavell makes
clear, is a philosophy that replicates
3
The editors added a few “thematically
congenial pieces written after 2001”
while omitting texts Cavell subse-
quently published in other books.
the weird split between math and meta-
physics, close technical analysis and
broad cultural or ideological back-
ground, that one finds in too much
writing about music, “as though music
has never quite become one of the facts
of life.” Having spent so many years
listening for shifts of tone and pitch in
ordinary language, Cavell found inspi-
ration in Wittgenstein’s remark, quoted
repeatedly in Here and There, that “un-
derstanding a sentence is much more
akin to understanding a theme in music
than one may think.”
Cavell is particularly impatient with
Theodor Adorno’s work, which he
finds insufficiently responsive to actual
musical experience. He concedes that
Adorno is, “like it or not, the thinker of
his generation, extending to the pres-
ent, who has most successfully made a
claim to have presented a philosophy
of music,” but finds Adorno’s claims
about particular pieces unconvincing.
He is puzzled by Adorno’s histrionic
assertion, for example, that the first
movement of Mahler’s Ninth Sym-
phony combines in some unspecified
way a sense of “constricted breath-
ing” with the movement of “a coffin in
a slow cortège.” How exactly, Cavell
asks, “does the connection of a diffi-
culty in breathing with the gait of a fu-
neral march capture the experience” of
listening to Mahler’s music?
In order to develop a satisfactory
philosophy of music, Cavell remarks,
“musicians and philosophers will have
to spend considerably more time to-
gether than they have become used
to.” He resists any philosophical in-
tervention that precedes actually lis-
tening to the music, whether it is one
of Adorno’s sweeping generalizations
about Schoenberg (“the decline of art
in a false order is itself false”) or the
musicologist Peter Kivy’s claim that
unless one is familiar with Descartes’s
theory of the emotions, Mozart’s Ido-
meneo will seem “out of tune with our
psychological reality.” To Cavell, this
is no more useful than researching the
four humors in order to understand the
emotions expressed in Othello. Listen-
ing to a quartet of voices from Mozart’s
opera, Cavell comments, “Surely I am
not alone in finding its projection of
isolation even in the grip of common
suffering . . . to be drop- dead convinc-
ing.” To Cavell’s ear, a particular “rage
aria to end all rages” in Idomeneo is ac-
tually “far ahead of” Descartes in the
way it links, by an unexpected plunge
below the expected tonic, the emotions
of rage and melancholy.
As he explored new ways of thinking
about music and the other arts, Cavell
was also experimenting with alterna-
tive ways of writing. In his later prose,
two voices, two styles, are seemingly
in conflict. One is a cascading, self-
referential river of clauses, most notori-
ously in the nearly page-long question
that opens The Claim of Reason:
If not at the beginning of Wittgen-
stein’s later philosophy, since what
starts philosophy is no more to be
known at the outset than how to
make an end of it; and if not at the
opening of Philosophical Investi-
gations, since its opening is not to
be confused with the starting of the
philosophy it expresses, and since
the terms in which that opening
might be understood can hardly be
41
 given along with the opening itself;
and if we acknowledge . . .
In Little Did I Know, with its time-
shuttling weave of diary entries al-
ternating with deep dives into the
remembered past, Cavell often adopts
this almost mannered voice, borrow-
on display, the “beautiful collection” of
birds in their “fancy-colored vests,” the
scorpions with which he felt “an occult
relation.” Walking through the zoo and
noting the animals “that Adam named
or Noah preserved,” he said to himself,
“I will be a naturalist.” What Emer-
son took from this revelatory visit, in

Newsletters
ing his serpentine rhythms from Henry
James and Marcel Proust.
But Cavell has a countering (or per-
haps contrapuntal) voice, which aspires
to the abruptness of aphorism. A talent
for the witty aside had always been a
resource in his writing, as when he re-
Cavell’s view, was not some simmering
conflict between scientist and philoso-
pher, but a confirmation of his instincts
as a writer. The “beautiful collection”
of birds matches “the way we are to see
[Emerson’s] sentences hang or perch
together.” According to Cavell’s read-

Must reads. marked in Pursuits of Happiness that

“a willingness for marriage entails a
certain willingness for bickering.” In
ing, “Every Emersonian sentence [is]
a self-standing topic sentence of the
essay in which it appears,” while Em-

Every day of his later writing, aphorism becomes

an end in itself. There is a moment
in Little Did I Know, dating from the
erson’s paragraphs are “bundles or col-
lections that may be moved.”
Cavell’s observation registers the

the week. summer of 1972, when Cavell, inspired

by the fragmentary writings—and
the Provençal landscape—of the poet
oddly percussive and additive qual-
ity of Emerson’s prose in essays like
“Self-Reliance,” as well as the num-
René Char, tries his hand for “ten days bered entries in Wittgenstein’s Phil-
of quite deliberate departure and di- osophical Investigations. But it also
rection in my writing.” The resulting gestures toward how Cavell wanted
ae
M ich is aphorisms, reproduced in Little Did I his own late writings to be received. In
ot th Know, pointed a way forward. “Advice “The World as Things,” he describes a
h at g ed up
W am on being human,” he wrote. “Do not sense of looking at the world, as well as
d ste YS stomach what you have no taste for, for writing about it, as “aggregation and
, an FR
IDA
e dia d” you will develop the taste.” Or: “Five juxtaposition.”
,m a senses and just one world. The odds One thinks in this regard of the bur-
c are wer M
h
alt “Po
were fair enough.” ied jar filled with “one of each differ-
c s , he ins’s A philosophy built entirely of apho- ent thing or creature.” In Little Did I
it i n k
Pol on Li risms is what Cavell found in his two Know, Cavell connects that moment
Ja s AY
S major models of philosophical style, with a radio announcement he heard,
SD
UR Wittgenstein and Emerson. For both around the same time, that the kidnap-
TH
thinkers, a turn toward the aphoristic per of the Lindbergh baby had been
nd
s t sa coincided with a rejection of system- executed. The radio emitted a hum
ca s atic aspirations. Cavell asks readers “to that Cavell assumed was the sound of
R pod ature
N o fe recall Emerson’s and Wittgenstein’s the electric chair. Six decades later, he
udi SDAYS relation, in their fashionings of discon- found himself “teaching a course on
E
DN nd tinuity, to the medium of philosophy opera and film [and] describing the
WE w sa
n e as aphorism, in counterpoise to its me- Overture of The Marriage of Figaro as
ng y
re ndi entar AY dium as system.” In an impressive essay expressing the hum of the world, spe-
T m RID
com Y—F
A
on collecting titled “The World as cifically the restlessness of the people
ND Things,” included in Here and There, of the world.”
MO
e Cavell relates Emerson’s interest in Cavell provides no explicit linkage
ul tur
n dc natural history museums to the magpie among these instances. He offers them
rt s, a assemblages—cullings from personal for inspection, like the exotic hum-
oks, a journals, quotations from stray read- mingbirds and parrots on display in the
Bo ing, fleeting insights—that formed his Jardin des Plantes. What comes across
S
AY
ND essays. most powerfully, in this and other pas-
SU
Cavell offers a fresh interpretation sages of “aggregation and juxtaposi-
les
ar tic of Emerson’s visit to the Jardin des tion” in Little Did I Know and Here
s top Plantes in Paris in July 1833, when and There, is Cavell’s attentive listen-
ek’
we Emerson (as many biographers have ing, throughout his long and distin-
pointed out) was overwhelmed by the guished career, for what one might call
YS
DA an Q
UR sts “bewildering series of animated forms” the hum of humanity.
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h No that’s been there no it’s something else:
nd AYS
MO
ND tnr.com/newsletter The origin story of the god
Of stories yes that’s it that headless
Moon not swollen with night but the moon
As it dissolves dawn’s haptic canvas
That self-portrait of the first silence

—Rowan Ricardo Phillips

42 The New York Review


Art Is a Tyrant:
The Unconventional
Life of Rosa Bonheur
by Catherine Hewitt.
Icon, 483 pp., $39.95;
$18.95 (paper)
A coastal hotel in Bordeaux, a Mar-
rakesh bathhouse, the first pet ceme-
tery in the US, a floating bar in Paris
renowned for its weekly Soirées Gay:
as the most famous female artist of the
nineteenth century, Rosa Bonheur left
her name across France and beyond.1
For many people now, it may be only
a name, since the decline of Bonheur’s
fame after her death in 1899 was as
precipitous as her rise through the
Paris art world had been. Born in 1822
into a poor family in Bordeaux, Bon-
heur by her mid-twenties had become a
celebrated animalière, or painter (and
sculptor) of animals: she painted oxen
in the field, lions, horses, sheep (wild
and domestic), and countless cows. Her
best-known picture, The Horse Fair
(1852–1855), hangs in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. It was donated by Cor-
nelius Vanderbilt, who had purchased
it in 1887 for $53,000 (about $1.6 mil-
lion today).
Bonheur’s painstaking realism has
long since fallen out of fashion, but in-
terest in her life as well as her art is on
the rise. This fall the Musée d’Orsay
will host its first exhibition devoted to
her work; a French postage stamp hon-
oring her bicentennial was issued in
March; and recently, the first full-scale
biography in forty years appeared: Art
Is a Tyrant by Catherine Hewitt.
Bonheur described her life as one
of “struggle, triumph, and glory.” At
the height of her career she had a stu-
dio in Paris, a mansion in Nice, and a
château at the edge of the Fontaine-
bleau forest—now a museum—where
she kept an unruly menagerie that
included monkeys, wild horses from
America (a gift from an admirer), and
a free-roaming lion named Fathma. On
one trip to England and Scotland, she
acquired a bull, two cows, four sheep,
and three calves. “They are so pictur-
esque and their color so beautiful that
I should like to paint them all at the
same time,” she wrote to her sister, Ju-
liette. “I shouldn’t like to fail with a sin-
gle one.” Hewitt writes that she studied
animals’ eyes especially; in them she
“felt certain she could see an animal’s
soul.”
Animalier art developed out of the
Romantic movement and flourished
in France and England from the 1830s
through the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The Romantics had a complicated
relationship with nature, both thrilling
to its terrifying power and intensity and
seeking to reconnect with its peaceful,
uncorrupted beauties. The art histo-
rian Whitney Chadwick has argued
that “it was the search for expressions
of feeling unencumbered by social con-
straints that underlay both the embrace
of animal imagery . . . and the fame en-
joyed by Rosa Bonheur.”
1
In 1979, Rosa Bonheur Memorial
Park near Baltimore (since closed) also
became the first cemetery to allow peo-
ple to be buried alongside their pets.
May 12, 2022
The Bucolic Heroic
Regina Marler
Rosa Bonheur; painting by Édouard-Louis Dubufe and Rosa Bonheur, 1849. In Art Is
a Tyrant, Catherine Hewitt writes that Dubufe painted Bonheur and she painted the bull.
Leading animaliers during Bon-
heur’s youth included Pierre Jules
Mêne, Jacques Raymond Brascassat,
and Constant Troyon; she admired and
learned from them. (She was rarely ad-
versarial, even as she clambered up the
ranks.) The Académie des Beaux-Arts
showed some resistance at first to what
seemed a trivial genre, but after King
Louis-Philippe awarded several public
commissions to the sculptor Antoine-
Louis Barye, his success helped estab-
lish animal art within the complicated
hierarchies of the French academic can-
on—a middling position somewhere
between landscape and genre painting,
Théophile Gautier argued. Barye spe-
cialized in depictions of exotic beasts
attacking or consuming their prey, with
titles like Python Killing a Gnu and
Tiger Devouring a Gavial. The first
paintings Bonheur submitted to the
Paris Salon showed such a mastery of
anatomy and naturalistic detail that her
work was compared with his.
Though Bonheur, a generation
younger, became far more success-
ful, Barye’s sinuous, expressive forms
weathered the transition to modernism
better than hers. (A line of influence
can be drawn between Barye, his stu-
dent Rodin, and Brancusi, who briefly
apprenticed with Rodin.) She is per-
haps more closely allied with the En-
glish painter and sculptor Sir Edwin
Landseer, whom she revered. Hewitt
describes Bonheur’s 1855 visit to Land-
seer’s studio in London, as recollected
RMN -Grand Palais/Art Resource
Paris, Rosa briefly attended her broth-
ers’ school, and later wrote that this ex-
periment in coeducation “emancipated
me before I knew what emancipation
meant and left me free to develop natu-
rally and untrammelled.”
After Sophie’s early death—from
strain and overwork, by most ac-
counts—Raimond enrolled Rosa in
a girls’ boarding school, where she
made herself “an element of discord,”
she recalled proudly. Only for art con-
tests—judged by her father—did she
apply herself. Thus, almost as a last
resort, she won the chance to pursue a
career as an artist. Raimond organized
a home académie for her, assigning her
copying tasks similar to those at the
all-male École des Beaux-Arts. Soon
she was painting from nature and going
to the Louvre to copy masterworks
and endure the jibes of male art stu-
dents. Later, when Raimond suggested
she sign her work with his name, she
refused.
As well as sketching in the Bois de
Boulogne and at the zoo in the Jardin
des Plantes, Bonheur also ventured
into Paris slaughterhouses, like her
male contemporaries; these studies
gave her the command of anatomy that
caught the eye of the Salon judges. She
also made trips into the countryside
to sketch animals in nature: “I loved
capturing the rapid movement of the
animals, the sheen of their coats, the
subtlety of their characters, for each
animal has its own physiognomy.” At
home she kept a growing menagerie of
models, including birds, rabbits, ducks,
butterflies, rats, a squirrel named Kiki,
a ewe, and a billy goat. Guests were
“greeted by the unmistakable odor of
livestock and the sounds of bleating,
chirruping and scuttling of all sorts.”
by her chaperone, Lady Eastlake, who Upstairs, in a large, well-lit room, the
translated Landseer’s remarks for the Bonheur siblings set up their easels be-
silent Bonheur: side their father’s—a cottage industry
in the making.
Landseer presented one picture or Bonheur made her debut at the
sketch after another, and at the end 1841 Paris Salon at nineteen; the jury
of the visit, offered her two of his selected two of her works: a sketch of
brother’s engravings of his Night goats and sheep grazing and a paint-
(c. 1853) and Morning (c. 1853), on ing of rabbits. Although women had
which he inscribed her name with been exhibiting at the Salon since the
his. 1780s—Raimond had urged Rosa to
adopt Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun as a
Afterward, in the carriage home, “the role model—their work was seldom
Englishwoman noticed that ‘the lit- taken seriously. “Women painters pre-
tle head was turned from me, her face fer sentimental little scenes, flowers
streaming with tears.’” and portraits,” wrote Théophile Thoré,
a prominent critic of the day. But Bon-
heur pressed forward with her unusual
Marie-Rosalie Bonheur was the el- specialty: three paintings and a clay
dest of four siblings who all became sculpture in 1842, two paintings and
professional artists. Her father, Rai- a plaster bull in 1843. Every work she
mond, was a minor genre painter and submitted to the Salon was accepted.
drawing instructor, which became She began to attract sales and in 1844
Rosa’s entrée to a profession largely received her first brief press mention:
closed to women. From a young age she the models for her painting Sheep in a
was artistically precocious but indiffer- Meadow were said to be among “‘the
ent to schooling; she had no interest in softest, cleanest, most abundant in
learning to read until her mother, So- fleecy wool’ of their species,” Hewitt
phie, taught her the alphabet by having writes.
her draw animals for each letter. Her reputation grew with each
Perennially short of cash, Raimond Salon. She earned a third- class prize
moved the family to Paris when Rosa in 1845 and finally, three years later,
was seven, beginning a difficult, itiner- a gold medal—awarded by a jury that
ant existence. Prone to enthusiasms, he included Camille Corot, Ernest Meis-
converted to Saint- Simonianism, a bur- sonier, and Eugène Delacroix. Govern-
geoning Christian socialist movement ment commissions followed. The first
that advocated education for women, was Plowing in the Nivernais (1849): on
among other progressive ideals. In a canvas of nearly 52 by 100 inches, the
43

New York Review Books
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44
muscularity of Bonheur’s oxen, strain-
ing against the harness in a freshly
plowed field glowing with sunlight—a
genre one might dub the Bucolic He-
roic—compares well with the tepid cat-
tle paintings of Gustave Courbet from
the same period. The painting, now at
the Musée d’Orsay, was a crowd favor-
ite at the Salon. “It is horribly like the
real thing,” Cézanne later remarked.
The peak of Bonheur’s career,
though, was without a doubt her monu-
mental painting The Horse Fair. At 96
by 199 inches, it covers most of a wall in
the Met’s European wing. Bonheur had
begun preliminary sketches for two
paintings, The Horse Fair and Hay-
making in the Auvergne, when a French
government minister, offered the choice,
commissioned the latter scene. It would
prove a poor bargain for the nation, since
Haymaking, now at the Château
de Fontainebleau, feels static and
forced, with generic peasants and
a heavy central wedge of shadow
cast by the hay cart. In contrast,
The Horse Fair is a masterpiece
of animal energy, its galloping,
barely controlled horses spinning
against the trees on a wide, dusty
Parisian boulevard, and even the
sky alive with motion.
The idea for the painting had
come to Bonheur while sketch-
ing in the Pyrenees; she wanted
to work on a large scale and re-
membered the fragment of the
Parthenon frieze she had studied
in the Louvre. For months, dis-
creetly clad in trousers, she frequented
the twice-weekly horse market on the
Boulevard de l’Hôpital, sketching the
Percheron workhorses and the men who
handled them. She prioritized her “great
picture” over Haymaking, and had to
work relentlessly to complete it before
the 1853 Salon. If it failed, the govern-
ment might withdraw its commission.
Hewitt recounts the sensation The
Horse Fair created. Bonheur deserved
a first- class medal, Delacroix remarked
in his journal, but no artist could
be awarded the same prize twice. A
London-based art dealer, Ernest Gam-
bart, bought the painting and arranged
for it to tour Britain, including a private
viewing for Queen Victoria. Thousands
of reproductions followed. On her 1856
trip to England and Scotland with
Gambart, she was surrounded by ad-
mirers, and even John Ruskin came to
meet her, though he thought her prefer-
ence for animals an artistic weakness.
During an after- dinner argument, he
exclaimed, “I don’t yield; to vanquish
me, you would have to crush me.” “I
wouldn’t like to go so far as that,” Bon-
heur replied.
The first biography of Bonheur ap-
peared in 1856, and in 1865 she was
made a chevalier of the Légion d’hon-
neur. When Empress Eugénie, the wife
of Napoleon III, pinned the medal on
Bonheur’s chest, she said, “Genius has
no sex.”
In his essay “Why Look at Animals?”
(1977), John Berger noted the funda-
mental nostalgia of animalier art:
The treatment of animals in
nineteenth-century romantic paint-
ing was already an acknowledge-
ment of their impending disappear-
ance. The images are of animals
receding into a wildness that ex-
isted only in the imagination.
Publicity materials for the upcoming
Musée d’Orsay exhibition suggest that
the curators aim to investigate how
Bonheur’s portrayal of animals “calls
into question the hierarchy between
species.” That may be going too far,
but her art both influenced and devel-
oped alongside the emerging animal
welfare movement. The first animal
protection laws in France appeared in
the 1850s, and Bonheur corresponded
with friends in England’s antivivisec-
tion movement.
On the other hand, as Hewitt points
out, Bonheur was no vegetarian; her
letters are full of delighted descrip-
tions of country pâté and haunches of
venison. She loved hunting, and a pic-
ture survives of her sketching a freshly
killed deer strung up in a lifelike stand-
ing pose—a literal nature morte that
Rosa Bonheur’s studio, 1862
now feels grotesque and at odds with
her genuine sympathy for animals. (A
friend of Bonheur’s recalled a little
mare at Fontainebleau that would rear
up to rest its hooves on her shoulders
and take a sugar cube from her mouth,
then follow her inside.)
As soon as she could afford it, Bon-
heur left Paris to live at Fontainebleau,
where she could quietly cohabit with
her partner, Nathalie Micas, who was
also her studio assistant and business
manager. (When Gambart made an
offer on The Horse Fair, Hewitt tells
us, it was Micas who drove a hard
bargain.) At Fontainebleau Bonheur
painted as much as eighteen hours a
day and walked for miles in all weather
through the woods in her favorite cos-
tume of loose peasant trousers. When
Bonheur is written about—then as
now—invariably the trousers feature.
Cross- dressing was illegal in France at
the time: an 1800 statute had sharply
restricted women’s rights, including
what they were allowed to wear, but
Bonheur received a rare permission de
travestissement—official permission to
cross- dress.2 It was granted on hygienic
grounds, so that she would not have to
sully her skirts with mud or manure as
she worked.
Bonheur had first adopted trousers
to avoid harassment from men she en-
countered while out sketching. “Her
strong face and short hair lent them-
selves admirably to this disguise,” one
relative recalled. “Rosa was everywhere
taken for a young man.” The garments
proved congenial, and she soon wore
them routinely at home. In the woods
or when traveling, she added a revolver.
Bonheur’s retreat to Fontainebleau
cost her some currency in the Paris art
scene. She stopped exhibiting in the Sa-
2
Incredibly, the cross- dressing law
remained on the books, if largely ig-
nored, until 2013.
lons, in part because Gambart and her
Paris dealer, Tedesco, snapped up most
of her new work for foreign buyers. In
France, while the honors piled up and
fashionable people interrupted her
studio hours, she became a respected
elder rather than a living influence on
younger artists.
After Bonheur’s death in 1899, de-
mand for her work fell as modernism
took hold. By World War I, her paint-
ings, along with the entire animalier
genre, seemed hopelessly passé. She was
excluded from the standard art history
texts, beginning with Helen Gardner’s
Art Through the Ages, first published in
1926. 3 Though included in Judy Chica-
go’s The Dinner Party (1979), she didn’t
merit a place setting of her own. The
critic Robert Hughes referred to her as
“the French cattle painter Rosa Bon-
heur” and pointed to her career
New York Public Library
as an example of inflated valua-
tions that bottomed out.
In her 1971 essay, “Why Have
There Been No Great Women
Artists?” Linda Nochlin ob-
served that successful artists
like Bonheur were often cited to
justify limited opportunities for
women: if she could reach such
heights almost unaided, women
clearly weren’t hindered by
their exclusion from the best art
schools and high-profile awards
like the Prix de Rome. Bonheur’s
challenge to gender stereotypes
was nevertheless the main lens through
which contemporaries saw her. While
Gautier declared her “at the very top
of the field of animal painting,” most
critics lauded her in the usual terms
accorded gifted women: “Mlle Bon-
heur paints almost like a man” (Thoré
again). Sadly, Hewitt uncritically reiter-
ates what became a standard dichotomy
between Rosa’s “masculine” manner
and ambition and her “feminine” tech-
nique. “She looked and behaved like a
boy but when she drew, she did so with
feminine sensitivity,” she writes; Bon-
heur “possessed the stamina of a man
and the delicacy of touch of a woman.”
More surprising is that Bonheur’s
gender presentation sparked so little
objection during her lifetime. (She was
once arrested because police assumed
she was a cross- dressing man.) To some
extent, her trousers may have made
sense to critics for whom genius did
have a sex. As Germaine Greer wrote,
“It was thought that Bonheur had es-
chewed her sexuality altogether and
become great as a result.”
In some respects, Bonheur followed
one of her literary heroes, George
Sand, who wore trousers to get into
men’s clubs and other places closed to
her as a woman. But Bonheur shunned
the kind of notoriety Sand courted. “If
you see me dressed this way, it is not
in the least to make myself stand out,
as too many women have done,” she
3
Granted, Bonheur was in a large,
boisterous company of the forgotten:
not a single woman made it into Art
Through the Ages or the later stan-
dard textbook, H.W. Janson’s History
of Art (1962). Gardner’s 1936 edition
briefly mentioned Mary Cassatt and
Georgia O’Keeffe, but Bonheur only
finally made it into the seventh edition,
published in 1976. She was excluded
from Janson’s until the eighth edition
in 1987—like all other women artists.
The New York Review
remarked late in life, “but only for
my work.” Yet it was not only for her
work: she habitually wore trousers at
home, and her biographers made much
of the dresses she changed into for vis-
its or travel; Bonheur loved to recount
her frantic struggles into a dress when
Empress Eugénie took to dropping by
unannounced. A neighbor recalled
that “what bored her most was going
to Paris, for it meant the discarding of
trousers, smock, and felt hat, as well as
the putting away of cigarettes.”
Hewitt does not touch on one rel-
evant midcentury cultural develop-
ment described by Henry James and
others: the circle of prominent Amer-
ican women artists in Rome, several
of whom (including Harriet Hosmer,
Emma Stebbins, and Mary Edmonia
Lewis) formed intimate partnerships
with women; some, like Hosmer, also
wore “mannish” clothes. Bonheur had
met Hosmer, eight years her junior, and
avidly followed her success.4 She was
also connected to this circle through
the Welsh sculptor Mary Lloyd, Bon-
heur’s friend and former student, and
the partner of the British feminist
Frances Power Cobbe. The kind of
mutually supportive, woman- centered
idyll that Bonheur created with Micas
may have been a model for other ambi-
tious women.
Art Is a Tyrant offers an orderly ac-
count of Bonheur’s life and career de-
spite the chaotic abundance of her two
main sources, both American: Theo-
dore Stanton’s Reminiscences of Rosa
Bonheur (1910) and Anna Klumpke’s
Rosa Bonheur: Sa vie, son oeuvre
(1908). Along with recalling his own
conversations with Bonheur, Stanton
(the son of Elizabeth Cady Stanton)
collected hundreds of letters and rem-
iniscences of the artist, producing a
413-page, closely printed cornucopia.
Bonheur regarded his questions as an
opportunity to set the record straight
and rattled on engagingly.
Similarly, when Anna Klumpke,
an American artist and Bonheur’s
companion in the last year of her life,
shared her journal with Bonheur—an
almost worshipful record of their days
together—she again took the chance to
correct earlier versions of her story, all
written by men. “The authors did not
know how to plumb the depths of her
mind,” Klumpke remarked, but “this
instinctive reserve vanished when she
faced a woman whose love and devo-
tion to her were sure.” The resulting
volume, translated by Gretchen van
Slyke as Rosa Bonheur: The Artist’s
(Auto)biography (1997), is a syrupy
but moving intergenerational love
story, as well as a fascinating “as told
to” autobiography of Bonheur from the
perspective of old age.
To these rich primary materials
Hewitt deftly adds political and cul-
tural background, weaving Bonheur’s
vivid recollections into fuller accounts
of, for example, the unrest of the
1830s (the Paris of Victor Hugo’s Les
Misérables) and the revolution in 1848,
4
Hosmer’s marble sculpture Zenobia in
Chains (1859), now at the Huntington
Gallery in California, was a triumph at
the 1862 Great London Exhibition—
and a shock to critics, who believed
women could not sculpt stone; some
at first argued that Zenobia must have
been made by a man.
May 12, 2022
art market changes that saw the decline
of the government- controlled Salon sys-
tem, and the rise of the independent art
dealer, which brought Bonheur finan-
cial success. At her death, in addition
to the château, she left Klumpke almost
her entire estate: investments totaling
over 300,000 francs and thousands of
artworks worth over a million francs.
The stories Bonheur told Klumpke—
along with her somewhat combative
last will and testament—make it clear
that, despite all she had achieved, she
still felt embattled: if she failed to pro-
tect her hard-won wealth, the forces of
patriarchy (in the form of her greedy
nephews) would rush in. “My family
has always taken a dim view of my right
to live as I please,” she wrote in a testa-
mentary letter, justifying her decision
to leave most of her estate to Klumpke.
“Having done my duty by my family, I
was entitled, like any adult earning her
own living, to my independence.”
Several photos survive of Bonheur
with Micas, who was described by a
friend as “odd, original, and devoted.”
Hewitt includes the best of these, taken
in Bonheur’s studio in their late middle
age. Micas slumps unsmiling in an arm-
chair, with a little dog curled on her lap;
Bonheur stands behind her in a paint-
ing smock. Both eye the camera with
some skepticism. Micas dedicated her
life to Bonheur, had a secret bedroom
near hers in the château, and died in
her arms in 1889. Bonheur’s protracted
grief lasted until Klumpke, a success-
ful portraitist in her early forties who
had idolized Bonheur from childhood,
came to the château to paint her por-
trait in 1898. Soon Bonheur was writ-
ing to her, “I thought I’d buried love
with my poor Nathalie; but my old
heart has come back alive to the love I
see in your eyes.” Negotiations with the
Klumpke family to gain their permis-
sion for her to move in with Bonheur
read very much like marriage settle-
ment agreements.
Only months later, Bonheur died
in Micas’s bed with Klumpke’s arms
around her. As promised, Klumpke
preserved the château, which was
handed down through generations of
her family until its purchase by the
present owner.
“She used to make her own little cig-
arettes,” a friend recalled of Bonheur.
When conversing in her studio,
she would often be engaged all the
time rolling them. Even when she
was as old as seventy-five, I have
seen her sitting up on the side of
her table . . . just like a young man,
with a smoking cigarette in her
hand. Her pretty little foot would
then slip conspicuously out from
under her trousers.
Another friend recalled that when
Bonheur walked through the fields,
“the peasants returning from their
day’s labour would bow to this ‘little
man with his fine white locks.’”
Bonheur is buried in Père Lachaise
cemetery in Paris, with Micas and
Klumpke, who died in 1942. Shortly
before her death, Klumpke bequeathed
one of Bonheur’s “feminine outfits” to
the Fine Arts Museums of San Fran-
cisco: a black velvet and satin ensemble
of jacket, vest, and skirt, with sturdy
black petticoat; the Légion d’honneur
rosette was pinned to the front placket.
Not one pair of the famous trousers ap-
pears to survive. Q
THE UNCOLLECTED
ESSAYS OF
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
Edited and introduced by
Alex Andriesse
Paperback • $18.95
Also available as an e-book
On sale May 24th
“The clever observations of critic
and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick
shine in this sharp collection. The
essays range from lyrical musings
on places Hardwick lived—Kentucky,
Maine, and New York—to insights
on literature and thoughts on
celebrities. . . This is a rousing
testament to Hardwick’s enduring
vision.” —Publishers Weekly
LETTERS TO
GWEN JOHN
Celia Paul
Hardcover • $29.95
Color images throughout
Also available as an e-book
On sale April 26th
“Beautiful, tender, and riveting.
I have taken this book into my
heart.”—Claire-Louise Bennett,
author of Checkout 19
ALSO BY CELIA PAUL
SELF-PORTRAIT
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick is
a companion collection to The Collected Essays,
a book that proved a revelation of what, for many,
had been an open secret: that Elizabeth Hardwick
was one of the great American literary critics,
and an extraordinary stylist in her own right.
The thirty-five pieces that Alex Andriesse has
gathered here—none previously featured in
volumes of Hardwick’s work—make it clear that
her powers extended far beyond literary criticism,
encompassing a vast range of subjects, from New
York City to Faye Dunaway, from Wagner’s Parsifal
to Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions, and from the
pleasures of summertime to grits soufflé. In these
often surprising, always well-wrought essays, we
see Hardwick’s passion for people and places,
her politics, her thoughts on feminism, and her
ability, especially from the 1970s on, to write
well about seemingly anything.
“Andriesse’s collection of 35 previously uncol-
lected essays. . . is well timed. In the first piece,
Hardwick writes that a ‘collection of essays is a
collection of variations,’ and these pieces show-
case her own range of interests. . . This judicious
gathering is a fine place to sample Hardwick’s
work.” —Kirkus Reviews
ALSO BY ELIZABETH HARDWICK
THE NEW YORK STORIES OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK
SLEEPLESS NIGHTS • SEDUCTION AND BETRAYAL
THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
“A miraculous, door-opening book.”
—Julia Blackburn, author of Time Song
Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John centers on a
series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter
Gwen John, who has long been a tutelary spirit
for Paul. John spent much of her life in France,
making art on her own terms and, like Paul, paint-
ing mostly women. John’s reputation was over-
shadowed during her lifetime by her brother,
Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin.
Through the epistolary form, Paul draws compar-
isons between John’s life and her own: their
shared resolve to protect the sources of their
creativity, their fierce commitment to painting,
and the ways in which their associations with
older male artists affected the public’s reception
of their work.
Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate corre-
spondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters
(including full-color plates of both artists’ work),
and a writer/artist’s daybook, describing Paul’s
first exhibitions in America, her search for new
forms, her husband’s diagnosis of cancer, and
the onset of the global pandemic.
“It’s a work of biography, analysis, reverence, and
supplication, and it’s filled with buoyant repre-
sentations of both Paul’s and John’s work. A
charge runs through it, the crackly static elec-
tricity of two connected souls touching hands
across a century.” —Hillary Kelly, Vulture
Celia Paul, Self-Portrait, Gwen John, Self-Portrait,
Early Spring, 2020 with a Letter, 1907
45
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
johtui mieleen luvaton tupakoiminen. Hän näki parhaaksi heittäytyä
lattialle ja yhtyä toisten leikkiin.

Muori nosti padan liedeltä ja pani jalkaniekka kahvipannun tulelle.

Vai vielä tässä Rosto-Aslak puolustamaan papin kristillisyyttä!…

Aslak poltteli miettiväisenä eikä puhunut hetkiseen aikaan mitään.

Virkkoi sitten yht'äkkiä:

— Vaan jospa se pappi olisikin kristitty ja te muut väärässä. Sillä

täytyy kai Rauna-muorinkin myöntää, että on suuri ero papin ja
esimerkiksi Riuhta-Pieran välillä, joka "lainailee" poroja, niinkuin
suruton lappalainen konsanaan?

— Älä, älä! Vai pissihaukan virkaan rupeat taas! Kuka se tässä

elämässä on täydellinen? Huihai, ei pappikaan! — Aina sinä siihen
elämään vetoat. — Mutta pääasia on tuntea syntinsä ja rukoilla
anteeksi, niinkuin Riuhta-Piera tekee. Kyllä henki henget tuntee.

— Niin — lisäsi hän ja kohensi tulta takassa — synnintuntoon

pitäisi sinunkin tulla, Aslak, ennenkuin mitta täyttyy.

Aslak ei vastannut mitään. Puhaltelihan vain savupilven toisensa

jälkeen. Hänen täytyi itselleen tunnustaa, että hän pelkäsi jonkun
verran Rauna-muoria. Sen puheet olivat niin kummallisia. Joka
käynnillä hän sai kuulla "synnin mitasta", joka muka täyttyisi kerran.
Pelkoon vaikutti vielä muuan uni, jonka hän pari vuotta takaperin oli
nähnyt.

Hän oli ollut seisovinaan avaralla jängällä, jossa kasvoi

hillankukkia ihan valkoisenaan. Hän asteli suopunki kädessä jänkää
ristiin rastiin, ja kun hän katsahti taaksensa, huomasi hän, että
jokainen askelen jälki oli veripunainen. Hillankukatkin, jotka olivat
joutuneet hänen jalkainsa alle, olivat muuttuneet veripunaisiksi. Hän
tarkasti kengänpohjiaan, mutta niissä ei näkynyt verta. Hän astui
muutaman kerran koetteeksi, mutta tulos oli sama: jäljet olivat
punaiset. Levottomana lähti hän silloin astumaan jängän toista laitaa
kohti ja hän koetti kulkea niin suoraan kuin mahdollista. Sinne
päästyään hän silmäsi taaksensa ja näki, että koko jängän toinen
laita, josta hän oli lähtenyt, oli kerrassaan muuttanut väriään: se
hohti kauttaaltaan verenkarvaiselta. Hän huomasi, kuinka jalan jäljet
levisivät ja yhtyivät toisiinsa, värjäten kukkamättäätkin punaisiksi.
Viimeisiä jalanjälkiä myöten tulvasi punainen aalto hänen luoksensa.
Hän koetteli mätästä jalkainsa juuressa, käsi tahraantui vereen.
Silloin kuuli hän kolean äänen huutavan: "Kun koko jänkä on
punainen, silloin on Aslak Roston synnin mitta täysi!" Siitä säikähti
hän niin, että lähti hätääntyneenä juoksemaan jängän reunaa pitkin
niin paljon kuin jaksoi. Kohisten tuli punainen aalto hänen
kintereillään. Silloin hän huomasi, että metsän reuna oli aivan
vieressä. Hän otti siis vauhtia ja hyppäsi metsään. —
Hengästyneenä ja puolipyörryksissä katseli hän edessään olevaa
jänkää, joka hohti verenkarvaisena, minne hän vain silmänsä loi.
Hillankukat olivat vielä punaisempia kuin mättäät, joissa ne
kasvoivat. Ne heloittivat kuin tummat veritäplät
vaaleammanpunaisella kankaalla. Punaista, ylt'yleensä vain
punaista. — Aslakkia kauhistutti niin että hän värisi. Hän ei tahtonut
saada silmiänsä irti tuosta kamalannäköisestä jängästä. Katse kiersi
sitä kuin lumouksissa. — Yht'äkkiä Aslak huomasi, että yksi kukka
jängän laidassa oli vielä jäänyt valkoiseksi ja samassa hän tunsi, että
jos hän siihen koskettaisi, muuttuisi sekin toisten kaltaiseksi — ja
silloin tulisi tuho. — Siihen hän oli herännyt.
 Rauna-muorilla oli kahvi valmiina ja hän kehoitti Aslakkia
ottamaan. Aslak astui pöydän luo ja huomasi, että toinen kupeista oli
vähän vailla; toisella sen sijaan tulvehti kahvi lautasellakin.
Vaistomaisesti otti hän vajavamman kupin eikä tiennyt itsekään,
minkävuoksi.

— Se oli minun kuppini, sanoi Rauna-muori. — Tuo toinen oli

sinulle.

— Minä join jo pappilassa…

Hän ryyppäsi kupin kiireesti ja nousi lähteäkseen. Rauna-muori

kiiruhti täyttämään kuppia uudelleen, mutta Aslak kielsi.

— No mikä sinuun nyt meni, kun ei kahvi kelpaakaan?

— Enpä häntä… on sitä juotukin.

Hän sanoi hyvästit ja Rauna-muori huusi perään:

— Tule illalla seuroihin!

Ulkona oli jo pimeä. Aslak käväisi vielä aitallaan ja lähti sitten

astelemaan kylän toiseen päähän. Hänen piti vielä käydä
nimismiehessä.

Tenomuotkan kirkolla oli kaksi henkilöä, joita Aslak pelkäsi:

Rauna-muori ja nimismies Lang. Heillä oli molemmilla samanlainen
ominaisuus: he vainusivat hänen elämässään jotakin mustaa.
Rauna-muori luki hänelle väliin kuin kirjasta, mitä hän milloinkin oli
tehnyt. Niinkuin äskenkin. "Kenen poroja sinä nyt olet ollut
nylkemässä?" Se tiesi sen, mutta ei tiennyt kuitenkaan, että ne olivat
Salkko Hukan, nuo kymmenen sarvipäätä, jotka makasivat
Peeravuoman lumipurnuihin haudattuina. — Vai olisiko se ollut
sattuma? Miten lie? Omituisesti vaan oli muorin kysymys vaikuttanut
Aslakiin. Hän ei voinut itselleen selittää, mistä oikeastaan johtui tuo
pelko, että Rauna-muori näkee ja tietää. Saihan hän väliin kuulla
muiltakin samasta asiasta, mutta se ei vaikuttanut ensinkään
hermostuttavasti. — Nimismies taas ei koskaan sanallakaan
viitannut hänen elämäänsä. Mutta näki selvästi, että hänkin tiesi,
minkälainen mies Aslak Rosto oli. Hän tunsi sen joka kerta,
astuessaan Langin virkahuoneeseen. Tuntui aivan siltä, kuin olisivat
poronsarvissa riippuvat käsiraudat puhelleet: 'Hyvää päivää, Aslak
Rosto! Tässä me vielä olemme, mutta pian taidamme tulla luoksesi.
Me ikävöimme sinun ruskeita kalvosiasi.' Ja eikö ollut Salkko Hukka,
kirottu, kerran joikannutkin Suuvuonon markkinoilla: 'Tenomuotkan
nimismies käsirautoja takoo Rosto-Aslakille.'

Aslak kiiruhti askeleitaan, kuin päästäkseen eroon ikävistä

ajatuksista. Hän puristi aitasta ottamaansa poronpaistia lujemmin
kainaloonsa, kuin turvatakseen johonkin. Saisi nähdä, ottaisiko Lang
vastaan hänen lahjansa.

Nimismiehen virkahuoneesta näkyi tulta, kun Aslak saapui pihaan.

Hän huomasi Langin istuvan pöytänsä ääressä kirjoittamassa.
Peräseinällä riippuivat käsiraudat entisellä paikallaan. Mitä varten se
noita pitää tuossa näkösällä? Niinkuin eivät ihmiset tietäisi, että
nimismiehellä on sellaiset. Nehän kuuluvat jo virkaan…

Aslak kompuroi pimeän eteisen läpi ja astui rohkeasti sisään.

— Iltaa! sanoi hän lujalla äänellä ja koetti olla katsomatta rautoja,

mutta katse pyrki väkisinkin niitä hipaisemaan.
 Nimismies keskeytti kirjoituksensa ja katsahti Aslakkia kysyvästi
silmälasiensa takaa. Hän oli pitkä, roteva mies. Suun ympärillä oli
tuima piirre, ja koko kasvoilla asusti totisuus, jota tällä hetkellä
erikoisesti lisäsi otsalle valahtanut tukka. Silmien sävy vain ei ottanut
oikein sulautuakseen kasvojen jyrkänvakavaan ilmeeseen. Ne olivat
pehmeät ja vähän uinailevat.

— Iltaa! lausui hän syvällä, rintaäänellä, aivan samanlaisella,

jonka
Aslak oli tottunut kuulemaan käräjätuvassa. — Mitä Rostolle kuuluu?
—
Eipä erityisiä… siinähän menee.

Aslak istahti oviseinämällä olevalle tuolille ja laski paistin

viereensä lattialle.

Syntyi kiusallinen vaitiolo, jonka kestäessä Aslakin täytyi

väkistenkin katsoa aivan edessään, vastapäisellä seinällä riippuvia
käsirautoja.

— Mitkä ne nuo ovat? kysyi hän äkkiä viitaten rautoihin.

Nimismies katsahti häneen syrjäsilmällä eikä näyttänyt oikein

käsittävän, oliko toinen tosissaan vai eikö.

— Eikö Rosto niitä tunne?

— Mistäpä se hullu lappalainen kaikkia… Aslak siristi silmiään.

— Ne ovat ketunraudat, sanoi nimismies.

— Vai niin. Minkälaisia kettuja niillä pyydetään?

 — Sellaisia suuria ja vaarallisia, joita on vaikea muuten saada.
Nimismies hymyili veitikkamaisesti silmälasiensa takaa.

Katso sitä veitikkaa, kun laskee leikkiä, ajatteli Aslak.

— Vai niin, vai sellaisia. Enpä minä ole ennen sellaisista kuullut.

— Eipä ole tainnut Rosto kuulla.

Vaitiolo.

— Minkälaisilla asioilla se Rosto nyt liikkuu?

— No enpä erityisemmillä… Kuulin vain tuolla, että olisivat entisen

papin palkkarästit maksettavat.

— Jaha. Kumma, ettei Rosto niitä papille itselleen suorittanut.

— Ei tullut. Se oli sellainen mutkikas äijä, ettei sen kanssa

kehdannut riidellä.

— Riidellä? Tarvitsiko sen kanssa riidellä? Eikö se ollut kristitty

mies?

— Tiesi jo, mikä lie ollut.

Nimismies otti rästiluettelon esille ja Aslak suoritti maksunsa.

— Se taisi nyt olla viimeinen kerta sille äijälle?

— Niin oli. Tästälähtien perii uusi pappi. — Onko Rosto vielä

nähnyt uutta pappia?

— Olen. Äsken kävin tervehtimässä.

 — No miltä tuntui?

— Mikäpä siinä… höyli mies…

Tuli taas vaitiolo, jolla aikaa nimismies jatkoi kirjoittamistaan.

— Taitaa olla Rostolla lihaa myydä? Nimismies kurkisti pöydän yli

ja silmäsi paistia.

— No eipä juuri… mistäpä sitä… Toin tämän vain sinulle lahjaksi,

jos otat vastaan.

Nimismies kävi vähän hämilleen.

— En ota lahjoja, mutta ostaa kyllä saatan, sanoi hän tuikeasti.

Kas, kas, miten ylpeä se oli, ylpeä ja arka. Luulikohan suureenkin

kiitollisuuden velkaan joutuvansa? Mutta Aslak Rosto ei myöskään
ollut mikään kauppasaksa. Minkä hän antoi, sen antoi hän ilman,
totisesti!

Hän nousi ja otti paistin lattialta ja laski sen pöydän nurkalle.

— Tämmöinen tämä on, sanoi hän kopeasti, — Ei tämän suurempi

eikä pienempi, tavallinen paisti. Ja nimismies saa sen ottaa, jos
tahtoo.

— Etkö kuullut, etten ota lahjoja? kivahti Lang ja pehmeissä

silmissä läikähti jotakin kovaa.

— Kuulin kyllä, mutta en uskonut oikein korviani. Minä lahjoitan

sen, mutta en myy hinnalla en millään.

— Pidä sitten paistisi! tiuskaisi nimismies ja nousi seisomaan.

 Aslak otti paistin ja heilautti sitä kädessään.

— Mitä merkitsee Aslak Rostolle yksi vaivainen paisti? sanoi hän.

Ei mitään! — Ehkä saan antaa sen sinun koirallesi?

Nimismies karahti punaiseksi. Mitä se hävytön uskalsi? Vai

koiralle!

— Mene ulos ja heti! karjaisi hän ja osoitti ovea. — Ei tarvitse

koirani poronvarkaan lahjaa paremmin kuin minäkään!

Aslakin silmissä välähti viheriänkeltainen liekki. Hän yritti sanoa

jotakin, mutta nimismiehen kookas vartalo läheni uhkaavasti. Hän
työnsi oven auki ja astui pää pystyssä ulos.

Pihalla hän pysähtyi hetkeksi ja mietti äskeistä kohtausta. Sydäntä

kirveli kiukku ja häpeä. Niinhän se ajoi hänet ulos kuin koiran. Se oli
sentään liikaa! Ja uskalsi nimittää häntä poronvarkaaksi! Se oli jo
enemmän kuin siedettävää! Tosin hän se oli, mutta uskaltaa sanoa
se. Siinä astui nimismieskin kielletylle alueelle ja hän, Aslak Rosto,
muistaa sen, totisesti muistaakin.

Hän kirosi ja lähti kävelemään kylälle. Mennessään heitti hän

poronpaistin naapuritalon pihalle halkopinon taakse. Siellä olkoon ja
sieltä korjatkoon, kuka halunnee.

Hän asteli nopeasti kylän toista päätä kohden. Ei se käynti

sentään niin hullumpi ollutkaan, kuin miltä alussa oli tuntunut. Hän oli
mennyt nimismieheen arkana, vähän peloissaan, mutta nyt oli pelko
poissa täydellisesti. Nimismies oli paljastanut itsensä hänelle ja siitä
oli Aslak kiitollinen nimismiehelle. Nimismiehen tuhoa ennustava
vakavuus oli särkynyt ja Aslak oli huomannut, ettei Lang niin
vaarallinen ollutkaan, kuin hän oli luullut. Sitä asiaa, jonka perille
koetetaan päästä, ei viskata asianomaisen silmille noin vain. Ja jos
niin tehdään, osoittaa sellainen menettely, ettei ollakaan niin varmoja
asiasta.

Aslak veti ilmaa keuhkoihinsa. Ei tiennyt nimismies enempää kuin

muutkaan. Tiesiväthän kaikki, että hän varasti, mutta enempää eivät
tienneet. Eikä se merkinnyt vielä mitään. — Ja hän oli pelännyt
Langin käsirautoja! Nyt hän ei enää pelkää.

Siinä oli tiensyrjässä lukkarin talo. Ikkunasta heitti takkavalkea

valojuovan maantien poikki. Sisältä kuului veisuun verkkainen tahti.

Aslak pysähtyi ja katseli sisään. Pöydän päässä istui lihava mies

kaksi kynttilää edessään ja silmäili tuvantäyteistä väkijoukkoa.
Pöydän toisessa päässä istui pappi ja vähän matkan päässä hänen
rouvansa. Toisessa päässä pöytää veisasi lukkari. Etupenkillä istui
Rauna-muori Nikke-pojan kanssa hartaus ryppyisillä kasvoillaan.

Siellä Outa-Jussa piti seuroja.

Aslak näki, että Jussa oli huomattavasti lihonut sitten viime

käynnin, ja että papinrouvalla oli korkea povi ja kauniit silmät.

Hän mietti jo mennä sisään, mutta samassa tuli joku ikkunaan ja

tirkisti ulos. Aslak pyörähti nopeasti ympäri ja jatkoi matkaansa.
III.

Seurojen jälkeen jäi joukko miehiä haastelemaan ja tupakoimaan

lukkarin pirttiin. Siinä istui penkillä ikkunan vieressä muiden muassa
seitsenkymmenvuotias kirkkoväärti, "setä Jussas", joka pitkän
toimintansa aikana oli auttanut kappaa selkään seitsemälletoista eri
papille. Hänen kasvonpiirteistään vetivät eniten huomiota puoleensa
kookas nenä ja syvällä päässä kiiluvat, hyväntahtoiset lapsensilmät,
joista jokainen "sedän" kanssa puheisiin joutunut saattoi jo
edeltäpäin lukea suopean myöntymyksen kaikkiin mielipiteisiinsä.
Hänen vierustoverinsa erosi pukunsa puolesta huomattavasti
toisista. Hänellä oli nimittäin yllä univormuntapainen, pitkä takki,
josta kumminkin puuttuivat olkaliput ja virkanapit. Se oli
Tenomuotkan entinen järjestyksen valvoja, nyt eläkkeellä oleva
vanhus, kylän kesken tunnettu "vanhan poliisin" nimellä. Perempänä
pirttiä kangaspuiden sivulla istuskeli vilkasliikkeinen, lyhyenläntä
naapuritalon isäntä, Kalttopää, joka puhuessaan heitteli päätään
puoleen ja toiseen sekä näytti ilmaisevan ajatuksensa yhtä paljon
kasvojen eleillä kuin sanoillakin.

Pappi rouvineen oli jo poistunut ja saarnamieskin oli vetäytynyt

kamariin. Sen vuoksi luistikin pakina vilkkaasti, kun ei tarvinnut
ketään ujostella.
 — Mitähän Outa-Jussa piti papista? kysyi vanha poliisi
nöyränhiljaisella äänellä.

— Eihän se Jussa papeista välitä. Liekö koko Suomessa yhtään,

jonka hän hyväksyisi. — Lukkari otti lattialta koivunrisun ja heitti
takkaan.

— Se on kumma, kun papit ja saarnamiehet eivät pysy sovinnossa

keskenään. Saarnamiehet moittivat pappeja ja nämä puolestaan
saarnamiehiä. Missä sitten lie vika?

— Eiköhän se ole molemmissa, lausahti setä Jussas. — Se kun

on vanha
Aatami kaikilla hah, hah! Sepä kumma!

— Kaikillapa tietysti…

‒ Ju ‒ ju.

— Setä Jussas täytti piippunsa uudelleen ja silmäili

hyväntahtoisena ympärilleen.

— Siivolta minusta näyttää tämä uusi pappi.

— Ei se luonnon siivous auta, jos ei ole pyhää Henkeä! — Rauna-

muori käännähti poliisin puoleen ja hänen mustat silmänsä tuikkivat
terävinä. — Parannus se pitää tehdä papinkin, jos mieli autuaaksi
tulla.

— Mistäpä sen niin varmaan tietää, jos olisi pappi parannuksen

tehnytkin?
 Rauna-muori pyörähti penkillään ovensuuhun päin. Siellä istui
pitkä, luiseva, mustapartainen mies.

Kuulkaapas Kurun Heemiä! Hän tietää papin kristillisyyden. On

kuullut
Aslak Rostolta.

— Mitä se Aslak sitten…? kysyi vanha poliisi varovaisesti.

— Aslak on tutkinut pappia ja tullut siihen päätökseen, että pappi

on — elävä kristitty!

Miehet nauroivat.

— Se on Aslakkia! Hah, hah!

Kurun Heemi tiesi vanhastaan, ettei Aslakilla yläpäässä kylää ollut

vaikutusvaltaa, mutta siitä huolimatta hän puolusti väärtiään:

— Saattaahan se Aslak sen tuntea…

— Tuntea! Poronkorvan hän tuntee, mutta ei muuta. — Rauna-

muori sylkäistä pihautti halveksivasti.

— Emmehän me taida tässä tarvita muiden arvosteluja.

Saatammehan me sen itsekin nähdä.

— Sepä kumma! urahti setä Jussas.

— Jo vain, myönsivät miehet.

Keskustelu katkesi. Karsinan puolella supattivat vain naiset

puoliääneen. Mutta Kurun Heemi hymyili salaperäisenä. Eivät ne
uskalla pitkälle asiassa, johon Aslak Rosto on sekaantunut. Usealla
läsnäolijalla olikin poroja Roston kylässä, sen Heemi hyvin tiesi.

— Mutta onpa sillä papilla naurusuinen rouva, aloitti setä Jussas

leikkisänä. — On sinne papin kyökkiin soma mennä pyhä-aamuna.
Rouva on heti ystävällisenä vastassa ja paikalla on kahvi pöydässä
— hah, hah!

— Setä Jussas se onkin ollut hyvissä väleissä kaikkein

pappilanrouvain kanssa, nauroi Kalttopää.

— Sepä kumma! Kaksinkertaiset kahvit minä juon joka sunnuntai

pappilassa, ensin kyökissä ja sitten papin kamarissa. Hah—hah!
Vanha poliisi ja lukkari saavatkin tyytyä yhteen pariin. Hah, hah!

— Niin vain… yksi parihan se riittää, myönteli poliisi.

— Enkä minä ole riidellyt pappienkaan kanssa. Hyvät ovat olleet

välit. Vaikka pakkasihan välistä Keinäs-pappi kiivastumaan. Kerran
jo oli tulla yhteenottokin ja piti läheltä, etten siepannut piippua
taskusta ja antanut pappia otsaan!

Naurettiin joukolla. Tunnettiin niin hyvin tämä setä Jussaksen

voimasana, jota ei kukaan ollut koskaan nähnyt eikä kuullut
täytäntöön pannuksi.

Sellaisissa tilaisuuksissa, joissa piipun olisi luullut tulevan esille, se

oli jäänyt siivosti taskuun.

Lukkarin emännällä oli kahvi valmiina. Sitä juotaessa kääntyi puhe

lähestyviin Suuvuonon markkinoihin, joille piti lähdettämän
seuraavalla viikolla.
 — Saapa nähdä, missä hinnassa ruijalainen pitää riekon tänä
talvena.

— Ei pitäisi olla aivan huonon. Luulen, että viitisenkymmentä äyriä

lähtee päästä.

— Sepä kumma! Ei niitä olekaan kovin viljalti ollut. Muistan minä

ajan, jolloin ei saatu kuin viisitoista tahi korkeintaan parikymmentä.
Mutta silloin olikin riekkoja viljalti. Parituhatta, kolmekin tappoivat
muutamat talot talvessa.

Se oli eri aikaa, sedän nuoruudessa?

‒ Ju — ju, viisikymmentä vuotta sitten.

— Sepä se.

Outa-Jussa tuli pirttiin ja istui penkin päähän. Hän oli noin

viidenkymmenen ikäinen, lihavahko mies, jolla oli parraton suu ja
ruskeat, vilkkaat silmät.

— Jussa lähtisi kamariin. Minä toisin kahvia, kehoitti lukkarin

emäntä.

— No eikö täällä saata juoda? Täällähän on muitakin.

Emäntä tarjosi kahvia ja Jussa kysäisi:

— Markkinoistako ne miehet…?

— Niin, puhuttiin riekon hinnoista. Ensi viikolla pitäisi olla raidot

kunnossa.
 — Niin vain. Olen minäkin aikonut pistäytyä Suuvuonossa. En ole
käynytkään moneen vuoteen. Taitaisin päästäkin poliisin raidossa?

— Miksi ei.

— Sieltä on tullut monet kirjat ja kutsut, jonkavuoksi pitäisi käydä.

— Sinne tuleekin paljon väkeä, joten luulisi seuroihinkin riittävän.

— Niin vain…

— Mutta joutaakohan se suruton kaupoiltaan? Rauna-muori oli

sytyttänyt piippunsa ja nyökytteli hiljaa ruumistaan.

— Siinäpä se.

— Mutta kun on taivaanvaltakunnan tavara kalliina, ei silloin ole

maallisista estettä.

— Niin vain…

Tupakoitiin ja haasteltiin ja muisteltiin menneitä markkinoita. Yksi

muisti yhden, toinen toisen tapauksen. Milloin oli eksytty lumipyryssä
ja kierretty koko yö yhtä ainoata tienviittaa. Omia, puoleksi umpeen
tuiskuttaneita jälkiä oli seurattu, kun oli niitä luultu vieraan jäljiksi. Oli
koetettu saavuttaa edessäajaja, mutta turha vaiva. Jälki johti yhä
eteenpäin eikä edessäajajaa kuulunut. Aamulla, ilman selvittyä
huomattiin, että olikin seurattu omia jälkiä koko yö ja kierretty isoa
ympyrää. Monenlaista seikkailua niillä matkoilla oli koettu. Milloin oli
markkinapaikalla varastettu jauhot ja sokerit, milloin talonpihalta
ahkion keulasta peski, jonka poromies oli siihen hetkiseksi heittänyt,
pistäytyäkseen sisään kahvikupin ryyppäämään. Milloin oli
varaslappalainen katkaissut pimeässä raidon poikki ja vienyt porot
ahkioineen kuormineen. Kun muutaman tunnin ajan jälkeen
pysäytettiin, huomattiinkin, että raito oli poikki ja porot tavaroineen
tipotiessään. Lähteä niitä sitten hakemaan pyryssä ja pakkasessa,
huihai! Useimmiten se oli turha vaiva.

— Mutta saimme me kerran Kurkkio-Joonaksen kanssa kiinni

sellaisen veitikan, kertoi Kalttopään isäntä. — Oli, koranus,
katkaissut raidon muutamassa notkelmassa ja ehtinyt jo kätkeä
joitakuita sokeritoppeja kinokseen, kun me Joonaksen kanssa
saavuimme paikalle ja otimme veitikan lujille. Ei siinä armoa annettu.

— No mitä teitte mokomalle?

Mitäs muuta kuin selkään vain! — Saapui siihen nimittäin toisiakin

raitomiehiä ja niin me luimme lappalaiselle lain kouraan: joko otat
raipat heti, taikka vastaat ensi käräjissä, ja väärti valitsi edellisen,
niin raskaalta kuin se tuntuikin. Syväjärven Niku rupesi piiskuriksi ja
siinä sai lappalainen pakaroilleen keskellä lumiaavaa — jäätyneillä
koivunrisuilla. Ulisihan se ja potki, mutta mikäs auttoi. — Vankeutta
olisikin tullut, jos olisi käräjiin menty.

Kalttopää heilautti päätään ja sylkäisi.

— Semmoista se on erämaan laki.

— Semmoista se on… Ja hupaisinta jutussa oli se, että Kurkkio-

Joonas loppujen lopuksi komensi lappalaisen maksamaan viisi
kruunua piiskurille — vaivoista! Hih, hih!

— Kova mies se Joonas…

— Kova… Mutta niin kaivoi väärti uikuttaen kukkaronsa ja maksoi

— arvelematta. Sitten annettiin potkut takapuoleen ja niin hän sai
painua.

Miehet nauroivat niin että pirtti kajahteli.

— Kuka se oli?

— Hurrin poika, Mauna, Äkässuvannosta.

— Ka se, jopa arvattiinkin… Voi sitä Joonasta! On se miestä, on

totisesti!

Sen perästä ei ole mies kestänyt tulla markkinasiljolla vastatuksin.

Ennemmin kiertää kuin kohti tulee. Ja jos on pakostakin kohti
tuleminen, niin nopeasti pyrkii sivu eikä muuta kuin katsoa luihauttaa
pahasti — noin.

Kalttopää painoi leukansa rintaa vasten, veti suupielensä alas ja

luimisti kulmainsa alta.

Tarinaa riitti kun kerran oli alkuun päästy. Markkinamatkoista

siirryttiin kalastusretkiin, joilla yksi ja toinen oli nuorra miesnä ollut
mukana Ruijassa. Oikein innostuttiin, kun päästiin näihin
"muisteluksiin". Ruijasta olikin useimmilla hauskimmat muistot. Sinne
vielä vuosienkin takaa ajatus palasi. Ei ollut monikaan heistä
milloinkaan käynyt "Suomessa", Lapin rajojen ulkopuolella. Ei oltu
nähty Suomen kaupungeita, mutta Vesisaaret ja Hammerfestit oli
käyty, moneenkin kertaan. Ei oltu ennen tietty Suomesta muuta, kuin
mitä joku matkustava Suomen herra taikka Ruijaan pyrkivä
"karkulainen" oli "muistellut". Niin eristettyinä oli eletty. Silloin näet ei
ollut "kruununteitä", niinkuin nyt. Nythän sitä jo tiettiin omastakin
maasta jotakin, kun "avisit" tulivat melkein joka taloon, ja useampi
nuoremmasta polvesta oli käynyt "Toorniossa", jopa Oulussakin. —
Mutta ennen vanhaan johtivat kaikki tiet Ruijaan. Siellä olivat
vanhukset nuoruutensa päivinä harjoittaneet kalastusta, väliin
vuosikaupalla. Tunnettiinpa siis Jäämeri. Sen tyrskyissä oli taisteltu,
usein hengen uhallakin. Oli soudettu "fämbööreillä" [fembording,
norjal. sana = viisihankavene], sen sijaan että nyt sauvoskeltiin
kotikoskia omatekoveneissä. Oli ajettu "tampilla", väliin pitkiäkin
matkoja. Toiset olivat olleet lastaustöissä eri vuonojen perukoissa ja
hengittäneet vuosikausia sillin, turskan ja saidan hajua. Olipa joku
tehnyt retken Huippuvuorille saakka jonkun tutkimusretkikunnan
mukana, ja sieltäkös riitti muisteluksia talvisen takkavalkean ääressä
lapsille ja lastenlapsille! Pysyväiseksi muistomerkiksi näistä
vanhojen kertomuksista olivatkin kylänlapset ristineet kievarin
vieressä olevan kaihon "Pitsperkiksi". Kalttopää oli matkoillaan
kerran tavannut Ranskan "frinssin" ja Meeranivan Matti, lukkarin
emännän veli, väitti olleensa viikkokausia kalanpyyntikumppanina
itse Englannin "herttyykillä". — Olihan sitä maailmaa nähty. Oli toki!

Ennenkuin väki hajaantui, veisasi lukkari iltavirren ja Outa-Jussa

luki rukouksen. Ilta oli jo myöhäinen, kun kyläläiset vihdoin taivalsivat
koteihinsa, tyytyväisinä kuulemastaan sanasta, mutta vanhat miehet
vielä tyytyväisempinä siitä, että oli taas saatu muistella Ruijan-aikoja,
— Ruijan, joka heille, vanhoille tenomuotkalaisille, merkitsi samaa
kuin sadoissa värivivahduksissa kimalteleva, sädehtivä nuoruuden
maailma.
IV.

Suujoen suussa, Suuvuonon pohjukassa kuhisi markkinaväkeä kuin

mehiläisiä suuressa mehiläispesässä. Lappalaisia tungeskeli joka
paikassa, alkaen jokisuuhun pystytettyjen kauppapöytien äärestä
vähän ylempänä joenrannalla olevien talojen pihoihin saakka. Väkeä
oli runsaasti ja markkinailon pitäjiä paljon. Varsinkin markkinapaikan
laiteilla, mihin kyläpoliisin järjestystä valvova silmä ei aina ulottunut,
teuhasivat lappalaiset pulloineen, hypellen yhdessä kimpussa niin
että siljo tömisi. Sieltä kuului vähä vähä hihkumista, joikkausta ja
käheä-äänistä mekastusta.

Salkko Hukka Tenomuotkasta ajeli kauppakojujen välissä, keskellä

tiheintä väkijoukkoa, sakeasarvisella härällään. Poro hypähteli
arkana sinne tänne ja ihmiset syöksähtelivät syrjään teutaroivan
elukan tieltä. Väkijoukosta kuului naisten kiljahduksia ja miesten
kirouksia, kun he äkäisinä toruivat humalaista ajomiestä. Mutta
Salkko ei välittänyt kiljahduksista eikä kirouksista. Tempasi vain
hihnasta ja pakotti pelästyneen ajokkaan eteenpäin.

— Salmon Salkko, houkka poika, koko maailman houkka,

tosi juoppo. Voiaa naa-naa… Ei oo vieläkään niin köyhä, kuin
te toivotte…
 joikkaili hän ja löi härkää hihnalla selkään.

Kyläpoliisi oli huomannut lappalaisen puuhat ja juoksi paikalle.

— Et sinä saa täällä ajaa! huusi hän ja tarttui poron sarviin.

Ajaa ihmiset nurin ja repii vaatteet tuolla sarvipäällään, toruttiin

väkijoukosta.

Salkko kömpi ahkiosta ja hänen kuparinvärisillä kasvoillaan oli

itsetietoinen ilme.

Minä olen maksanut, sanoi hän nikotelleen. ‒ Viisi kruu—nua,

hik…

Poliisi katseli häntä iloisena ja naurahti.

— Et sinä sillä rahalla saa ajaa keskellä markkinapaikkaa, torui

hän. Tuo viisi kruunua on ollut sakkoa muun markkinailoin
pitämisestä, mutta ajo ei siihen kuulu. Vie porosi pois ja paikalla, tahi
sakotetaan lisää!

Salkko nikotteli ja murisi, mutta totteli kuitenkin, talutellen poroaan

väentungoksen läpi. Mutta päästyään aukealle hän istahti jälleen
ahkioon ja ajeli rauhallisena kylää kohden, joka oli vähän ylempänä
mäellä.

— Salmon Salkollapa on kaksisataa naarasporoa. Voiaa

naa-naa… Salmon Salkon sakeapäät ovat jo niin päisevät,
että, että voiaa naa-naa kunne kuullaan nulkastaneen koko
elo ruukaltaa perässä… Voiaa naa-naa na-na naa

joikkasi hän ja ajeli mäkeä ylös.