Arts Advocates

Vincent Price

At one time, there was a distinct breed of celebrity who harnessed their popular appeal to engage in arts advocacy.  They were ubiquitous, and it was almost impossible to tune into radio or television without the likes of Vincent Price or Tony Randall or Kitty Carlisle touting an appreciation of Fine Arts.   Though many today may find this type of advocacy silly or hopelessly ‘middle brow,’ these champions of the arts, and others like them, were an important stepping stone for many into a deeper, more fulfilling world.  The accomplishments of figures like Price, Randall and Carlisle are not to be underestimated. 

Kitty Carlisle (1910-2007) was primarily an actress.  Movie buffs remember her turn in A Night at the Opera (1935) with the Marx Brothers, but she was also a staple on television, regularly appearing on such quiz shows as To Tell The Truth.  (She was also married to producer/playwright Moss Hart.)  Once her acting career slowed down, Carlisle worked for over 20 years as member and later chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts.  Carlisle’s greatest role was as a highly-visible advocate of the arts, lobbying the New York State Legislature and the United States Congress for funding. She crisscrossed the state to support rural string quartets, small theater groups and inner-city dance troupes.

In this role, Carlisle saw herself as a “Johnny Appleseed for culture,” especially in rural parts of New York State. “Wherever we go, the arts flourish,” she said. “It’s a cliché now that people say they want to make a difference, but I’d like to think that I somehow made a difference.”

Tony Randall (1920-2004), of course, is familiar around the world as fussbudget Felix Unger on television’s The Odd Couple (1970-1975).  But Randall was also a tireless advocate on behalf of opera, ballet, and in support of the American National Actors Theater.

Like many actors of his generation, Randall started on radio (he played Reggie York, the English detective on I Love a Mystery), but soon found supporting and starring roles in a string of now-classic 1950s film comedies, such as Pillow Talk (1959).  He transitioned easily into television, supporting Wally Cox on Mr. Peepers (1952-1955) before starring in three different television series of his own.

Randall’s devotion to the arts was broad and engaging.  He hosted the New York Philharmonic Orchestra’s concerts in Central Park, sang in a Metropolitan Opera production of Die Fledermaus, and in 1991, he founded the National Actors Theater, floating the project with millions of dollars of his own money because he fervently believed that the United States needed its own national theater.  He was chairman of the National Actors Theater until his death in 2004.

Few celebrities were more beloved than actor Vincent Price (1911-1993).  Star of films, television, quiz show staple and TV pitchman, Price worked with everyone from Orson Welles to Alice Cooper, and appeared in everything from the film classic Laura (1944) to The Brady Bunch.  On stage, Price spent several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s starring in Diversions and Delights, a one-man show by John Gay about Oscar Wilde, patron saint of this blog.  It is considered by many to be Price’s finest performance.

But Price was more than an actor; he was an avid devotee of the arts.  He was a noted collector, with a taste for paintings, Early American crafts and jade pieces.  He toured schools regularly, preaching the gospel of art, and offered his expertise to a variety of public projects.

Price donated some 90 pieces from his collection to the East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park, California, to establish America’s first teaching art collection in 1951. Today, the Vincent Price Art Gallery continues to present world-class exhibitions, and remains one of Price’s enduring legacies. The collection contains over 2,000 pieces and has been valued in excess of $5 million.

Price also worked to bring art to the people.  In 1962, Sears stores believed that, outside of major cities, fine art was not available (or affordable) to the general public.  The store approached Vincent Price to lead the program to change that. Sears selected Price not only for his fame, but also for his reputation in the international art world as a collector, lecturer, former gallery-owner and connoisseur who studied art at Yale and the University of London.

Sears gave Price complete authority to select the works for this daring initiative.  He canvassed the world for fine art to offer through Sears.  He bought collections, commissioned artists (including Dali) and applied his own innate sense of taste and quality.

The project was a great success.  The first show opened in Denver, Colorado, and included original works by the great masters, including Whistler, Rembrandt and Chagall.  Items ranged in price from $10 to $3,000, putting them within the reach of all Americans.  (Many of these pieces are still available, sometimes on EBay, with the legend The Vincent Price Collection stamped on the back.) 

In 1966, the Sears Vincent Price Gallery of Fine Art opened in Chicago, Illinois, featuring the works of talented, but lesser-known artists at affordable prices.  Price was involved with Sears until 1971, and was responsible for more than 50,000 pieces of fine art finding a way into American homes.

And who today has taken the place of Kitty Carlisle, Tony Randall and Vincent Price?  The public intellectual has not yet completely faded from the scene (one thinks of Harold Bloom or Christopher Hitchens), but the Arts Advocate is rare indeed.  Are celebrities leery of aligning themselves to an artistic cause due to possible charges of ‘elitism?’  Or are the Fine Arts now too alienating to the public-at-large?

It is time that some of our more public figures became advocates for the arts.  The cultural losses we could sustain without that passion and dedication are too terrible to contemplate.

Cultural Decay: TONY Edition #3

To the cultural observer, Time Out New York (TONY) offers a rich and varied menu of tasty bits of critical ineptitude.  Written with syrupy irony for the intellectually undemanding, TONY catalogs the decay of a once healthy and vibrant culture.  This week’s bounty includes the following tidbits:

Page 24 features a style profile of one Charley Hendee, who is “enraptured by the formal dress of Edwardian English gentlemen.”  The photos include this worthy in his “Edwardian” garb, sporting a ring through his nose.  Insert your own joke here.

Page 47 (in the Books section!) includes a notice for the Nevada Rose Book Release After Party.  This event takes “place after an exhibition of ‘cathouse’ photos from Nevada Rose at nearby Umbrage Gallery … [and features] performance artist Amber Martin, musician Julia Haltigan, fetish model Mika Tan and one of the book’s subjects, Bunny Ranch owner Dennis Hof.”    In the immortal words of Louis B. Mayer, “include me out.”

The Off-Off List page always offers one tasty example of cultural rot.  This week, we find a listing for the event Be Story Free.  It promises “a whole passel of Brooklyn’s finest experimentalists wage war on narrative in the ‘story addiction destruction system,’ which promises to wean your mind off conventional theatrical paradigms.”  But, that’s another story.

The most instructive article, though, is found on page 72, which features an interview with someone named Albert “Prodigy” Johnson.  “Prodigy,” recently released from prison for weapons possession, has penned his autobiography, My Infamous Life.  “Prodigy” summarizes his book by saying, “I’m just not a happy-go-lucky mother[expletive].”  “Prodigy” has high hopes that his book will raise awareness of his band, Mobb Deep.  “Intellectuals that read a lot of books might not have been interested in Mobb Deep before My Infamous Life, but now they might go ‘Who are these guys?’ and check us out.”  Or, perhaps, run for cover.

More next week!

Chantilly’s Grace

Château interior

My recent news piece on the Dahesh Museum’s upcoming exhibition of Islamic ornamentation in Dubai brought to mind that great art is often housed in the world’s most beautiful places.

I first came upon Château de Chantilly in 2006, while serving as a Public Affairs Director for Hoffmann-La Roche, the pharmaceutical company.  The Château, about 30 minutes outside of Paris, was the site of one of several dinners held over the course of a marketing conference.  However, instead of touring the manor house, or looking at its world class art collection, Roche herded its executives into the dining room, and then took us to the site of a (then) recent wedding which pared some sports figure with a spokesperson for some rock-and-roll cable channel.  A more damning indictment of corporate America would be impossible to conceive.

However, I would not let a chance to see masterworks (nor bask in a romantic milieu) slip by, and I managed to visit the Château at length before returning to New York. 

The Château is an architectural marvel.  The original mansion may have been built as early as 1528 (there is some dispute over the actual date), and was later rebuilt after extensive destruction during the period of the French Revolution. Architect Honor Daumet completely redesigned the Château when it was rebuilt in 1875-1881, and the front entrance and courtyard are remarkable in their beauty and grandeur.  My favorite interior of the entire complex is the chapel of the Hearts of the Princess of Condé, though the Hall of Honour is also lovely.

The Château was bequeathed to the Institut de France in 1897 and is now a park and racecourse.  The grounds offer stunning gardens and fountains, and the Château façade is interesting from any angle.

But most importantly, the Château houses the Musée Condé, perhaps the greatest collection of art in France after the Louvre.  Imagine if you will, a manor house holding a Botticelli, a Raphael, a Watteau, a Corot, let alone a Van Dyck, a Greuze, a Reynolds and a Delacroix!  And that is not the half of it, for the Château de Chantilly also holds over 1,300 manuscripts, and a library of over 12,000 volumes, including a Gutenberg Bible.  There is an extensive collection of incunabula along with Revolution-era textiles and furnishings, and several miniatures of merit.

My favorite work at the Château is the self portrait of Ingres (see below).  One of the great masters of academic art, Ingres painted (and drew) several different iterations of his self-portrait.  Ingres’ soulful nature, his passion for excellence, and, yes, his remote and imperious manner, are all visible here. 

Why this dispatch on the Château de Chantilly?  Two reasons, really.  First off, for many people passionate about the arts, France begins and ends with Paris.  The Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Paris Opera House, and one has ‘done’ France.  But this is not the case.  Château de Chantilly is just one of many artistic treasure chests that dot the French countryside.  And, also, an elegant place and setting for art is as essential as the art itself.  Just as beautiful and magnificent churches help bring the believer closer to a religious experience, so too museums must reflect the beauty and grandeur that is contained therein.  These are sacred spaces, and, as such, demand a certain majesty. (Of course, sometimes a hideous place also reflects the collection it houses – see New York’s Guggenheim, which looks rather like a toilet.)

Readers planning a trip to France are advised to visit the Château de Chantilly.

Ingres self portrait

Around With Nero Wolfe

One of the many blessings of not having cable or access to broadcast television is that my (rare) viewings are dictated solely by my own tastes.  I have recently been watching the Nero Wolfe series with Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin and the late Maury Chaykin (1949-2010) as Nero Wolfe and have enjoyed it immensely.  AMC’s Nero Wolfe was wonderfully smart, stylish and funny.  No wonder it did not last more than two seasons (2001-2002).

A DVD boxed set of the series can be found on Amazon, or, more affordably, on EBay.  I was lucky to find mine in a Barnes and Noble sales bin at half price, and could not have spent the money better.

Detective fiction has been a lifetime guilty pleasure, and I have been reading Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books with great satisfaction for over 30 years.  I’ve always had a rude picture of Archie in my mind – mostly of a hard boiled detective with a fast mouth.  However, Hutton has managed to sponge away nearly 30 years of envisioning and replaced the picture in my mind’s eye with himself.  I will never be able to see Archie in any other light again.

Chaykin is good as Wolfe (perhaps too emotional and somewhat sloppy for my taste), but Hutton is a revelation.  He plays Archie less like a tough guy and more like a 1930s sharpster.  He is less Bogart and more Lee Tracey.  He’s raffish, rakish and jaunty.  He doesn’t walk, he saunters.  His hat is cocked and his mouth is smirked.  He’s the quintessential New York wiseass between the World Wars – a vanished American everyman who is equal to every occasion.  He has smarts, savvy and his eye on the payoff. 

Archie, as conceived by Stout, is too much a comic character to exclusively be a tough guy (though toughness is one of his attributes).  That’s why Archie on film as a hardboiled dick doesn’t work; but, as a classic period smartass, Hutton is letter perfect.  Hutton’s Archie is a fast-talking American dandy, with a sense of style, sexiness and moxie.  Too bad the series didn’t last longer!

The series closely adheres to the original stories – each episode is an adaptation of a Rex Stout story.  And though the Nero Wolfe books are thematically and structurally securely fixed as part of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, they have always, to this reader, also stood apart from it.

Stout’s singularity in the field rests first in language. Few of the Golden Age writers were stylists, but Rex Stout (1886-1975) was a unique voice.  (Novelist Bill De Andrea used to say that the classic Stout sentence was: “Wolfe drank beer.”)  People with no taste for mysteries at all can read them with great satisfaction. Indeed, it's not surprising that P G Wodehouse was a great admirer. Like Jeeves and Wooster, the tale itself is only part of the pleasure -- most of the satisfaction is in the telling.  And, like Wodehouse, Stout had deftly captured an idealized national idiom -- his is a distinctly urban American voice at the height of the American Century.  Reading Stout is to savor a distillation of a national type that typified an era.  Stout is the music of the American idiom as Wodehouse is to the English.   

Another key factor in the success of the books is the Wolfe-Archie ménage. The brownstone and its routines is so completely conceived that it ranks with Conan Doyle's Baker Street as a place so fully realized, that it is a character in and of itself.  It becomes, in a way, our home as well, a refuge that delights, protects and nourishes us.  Once inside Wolfe’s brownstone, we invest in it all of the positive emotions we associate with ‘home.' And, because Wolfe guards this haven so zealously, it acts as an anchor for us --- a place of certainty in a changing and dangerous world. 

Unlike Dorothy Sayers, Stout was not an ambitious novelist. However, like Sayers, he wrote fully realized characters. Though they don't change throughout the series, Wolfe and Archie are drawn with a warmth and reality that elevate the books above mere mysteries.  The love-hate relationship between the two (one wag called it the struggle of two iron-willed co-dependents), their interactions, their mutual insults and antagonisms hiding affection, are the engines which drive the stories.

For all of his flamboyance, Wolfe never descends to simple caricature.  This is a problem with many characters found in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction – most of them become cartoons before overlong.  But Wolfe, with his weight and regimented life hiding some deeper mystery (some deeper tragedy?) is very real.

Finally, we come to Archie Goodwin. The real genius of the books is Stout's creation of Archie. Stout found a deep and rich vein of comedy in the books through Archie's amused, wry and cynical take on Wolfe and the world around him. He walks on the balls of his feet on the sunny side of the street -- hat cocked and dressed to the nines. And for all his cynicism, Archie is all heart.

AMC’s Nero Wolfe was a program with a flamboyant color scheme and high style.  Well, with their love of language and clever artfulness, the same can be said of the Rex Stout novels on which they are based.  The mystery novels of Rex Stout, and the Nero Wolfe series based upon them, are a tonic that is highly recommended.

The Dahesh Partners With Syracuse University for Exhibition in Dubai

Plate by Owen Jones

Readers with a taste for (or plans for) international travel will be interested to know of an upcoming joint exhibition between the Dahesh Museum and Syracuse University to be held in Dubai. 

The Dahesh was a haven for aficionados of 19^th-Century Academic and Orientalist art located in Manhattan’s East Side.  Since closing their doors, the museum has hosted (singly or in partnership) a series of fascinating exhibitions catering to connoisseurs.

The new, month-long exhibition is Reconnecting East and West: Islamic Ornament in 19^th Century Works from the Dahesh Museum of Art and Syracuse University.  It will unveil at the Dubai Community Theatre and Arts Centre (DUCTAC) on June 18 and remain on view until July 18.  The exhibition will celebrate the 19^th Century rediscovery of authentic Islamic ornament and design by Western scholars and artists.

The 'Orient' (which, to the 19^th Century mind, was most anyplace East of Istanbul), was a rich wellspring of inspiration to 19^th Century artists.  For example, Whistler and his contemporaries were particularly impressed with Japanese art, which also greatly influenced the Aesthetic Movement.  (Watch for comments on the recreation of Whistler’s Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery in an upcoming column.) 

At the same time, the Islamic world inspired the academic painters of the period.  Painters such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, Rudolf Ernst and Ludwig Deutsch, many of whom traveled to the Middle East in the 19^th Century, were prominent figures of this movement.  (Needless to say, they were a heroic breed of artists, as these expeditions were not without hazard.) 

Reconnecting East and West will trace the rich documentation of Islamic ornament and design by European artists and scholars, and feature color lithographs from Emile Prisse d’Avenne’s Islamic Art in Cairo, along with individual plates from both Grammar of Ornament and Alhambra, by Owen Jones.  Paintings by Ernst and Deutsch are on hand, and several prints after Gérôme.

The Dahesh was the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to collecting and exhibiting 19^th and early 20^th Century Academic art.  It also has an extensive collection depicting the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey (considered, at the time, the ‘Orient’).  The programs they have organized in recent years have always been revelatory.  It is hoped that some of this exhibition will travel to New York and perhaps show at the Palitz Gallery/Lubin House, where other Dahesh/Syracuse University collaborations have appeared.

Cultural Decay: TONY Edition #2

Every week, Time Out New York (TONY) offers stunning examples of our national cultural decay.  Written in an obnoxious ‘knowing’ style (the first draft probably in crayon) by mostly unwashed and underfed adolescents, TONY cheerfully revels in its own cultural illiteracy.  This week’s bounty includes the following jewels:

Page 126 includes a listing for Radio Play by Tommy Smith and Reggie Watts, who “modeled this surreal sonic experience on old-timey radio shows.” Now, the ubiquity of the fatuous locution “old-timey” has been a mystery to your correspondent.  It can be heard most everywhere, either in hushed tones of respect or dismissive derision.  TONY uses it indiscriminately, employing “old-timey” to describe everything from classic American cinema to the Italian Renaissance.  In context for TONY readers, I believe “old-timey” can be defined either as (1) anything pre-1980 or (2) anything worthwhile and irony-free.

(The same page describes The Tempest as “Shakespeare’s spectacular drama about a retiring magician,” which would not pass muster in one of our less-demanding high schools.  Perhaps TONY does not understand the distinction between “retired” and “exiled.”)

The most infelicitous bit of prose, however, can be found in the theater review on page 117.  Writer Adam Feldman begins: “The People in the Picture renders its story the way fat is rendered in an old Jewish home: over low heat, with traditional tools, in the service of making schmaltz.”  Allow me to introduce a new word to TONY readers: Yuck.

More next week!

The Affordable Art Fair, May 5-8, 2011

The Affordable Art Fair (AAF) opened for preview last night at 7 West 34^th Street, right in the shadow of the Empire State Building.  In terms of sheer number of attendees the evening was a marked success, with first-nighters shouldering one-another to grab champagne, meet artists, and look at pictures.  Buying was brisk and the fact that New Yorkers have so taken to this show indicates that it will remain a vibrant part of the City’s cultural landscape.

As is always the case with the AAF, there was some junk, some that was negligible, and scattered throughout works of great accomplishment.  Let’s address some of the lesser work first.

The contributions of Christian Dorey, represented by the Artêria of Bromont, Canada, consist mostly of post modernist gewgaws.  With titles such as Orange Gun, Who Wants Fish and Pink Target, Dorey chucks dabs of color at the canvas, leaving the viewer to wonder if this is the finished work, or merely the artist’s drop cloth.

Cibyl Delaire, represented by Concrete Utopia of Brooklyn, NY, presents work more suitably assigned to a dexterous child.  These consist of portraits of President Obama as seen on the covers of such magazines as People, Time and New York, done in bits of plastic detritus designed to look like quilt-work.  The description is more interesting than the finished product.

Nick Morris, represented by Hang Art of San Francisco, CA, regurgitates the tired Warhol trope of expanded comic book panels.  With pictures of Batman, Cindy Brady and women from various comic books, he works the same tired nonsense that was trite when Warhol first attempted it.  (There were one or two others who attempted more of the same tired nonsense, but by the time I approached their work, it was no longer worth taking down their names.)

Moving onto pictures of genuine quality, Julio Valdez of the Julio Valdez Studio in New York, NY, creates subtle work in oil of limpid coloration, delicacy of line and deep philosophical content.  Valdez is an artist to watch.

Mary Jane Ansell, of the Fairfax Gallery, Royal Tunbridge Wells, UK, is a modern master.  Working mostly in portraits, Ansell creates luminescent work in oil of deeply felt humanism.  The Girl with the White Shirt is an enchanting portrait delineated with surety and finesse.  Her Study for the Beauty of the Hours, another female portrait, seems to glow from within.  Also on hand were her portraits Illumine I and Illumine II, which rank to my mind as the finest portraits at the AAF.

Shaun Fergusen, represented by the same gallery, also makes a splendid showing with Flame, a portrait of a woman lighting her cigarette, done in acrylics.

However, the highlight for this viewer was the work of Mirelle Duchesne, represented by Windham Fine Arts, in Windham NY.  Most of her works are small, subtle still lifes of penetrating beauty.  Small enough to fit in a lady’s handbag, these gems depict vibrant floral arrangements beside everyday objects.  I thought her White Mum to be a tiny marvel, but equally captivating were Yellow Mum, Copper Pot and Ginger Jar.  These are pocket masterpieces, and are among the most affordable pieces at the Fair (most selling for only $600).  Duchesne is largely an unknown quantity in the United States, but I hope her reputation increases as her work is both beautiful and collectible.

For all the carping it is possible to do about some of the work displayed, the AAF is always a worthwhile experience.  It demonstrates that there is beauty in today’s art world.

Charlie Russell: Cowboy Artist

A Russell self-portrait from one

of his many letters

I have recently been reading with great satisfaction the letters of Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the cowboy artist.  This book, Paper Talk: Charlie Russell’s American West from 1979, is now sadly out of print.  However, a quick browse on Alibris, EBay or any used book site can deliver affordable copies.  The letters are edited by Brian W. Dippie, and they are fascinating and the art beguiling. 

Paging through his notes, it’s impossible not to like Charlie.  The word that would best describe him is … boyish.

As a boy, Charlie (it’s impossible not to call him Charlie, even Dippie does so), wanted to go West.  He did at 16 and, from then until his 30s, Charlie worked as a cowboy, watching the waning days of the American West with an artist’s eye.  He didn’t seem to be very effective in the saddle, but it was all he wanted and he was happy.

But Charlie was more than a cowboy; he was also a painter and romantic.  Once married and settled down, he spent the rest of his life memorializing what he saw in the West as a vanished time.  Like showman Buffalo Bill Cody before him, Charlie realized the colorful pageant of his life and time.  Perhaps what I like the most about him is his vision of the West. 

These letters are filled with stories of his days in the West, and illustrated with his own pen and ink drawings.  (Imagine receiving such a gem!)  Charlie was not a born writer, but he was a born observer and artist.  Along with Frederick Remington, Charlie Russell defined the vision we see in our mind’s eye when we think of the American West.  His pen line was strong and sure and his sense of color remarkable.  Both Remington and Russell are American masters, but I much prefer the inherent kindness found in Russell’s work.

Charlie’s West is not the West of hangings and gunmen and mud and misery.  Charlie was a boy, first and foremost, and his vision of the West is that of a boy.  Charlie’s West is endless prairies and freedom.  It’s sitting under a tree and jawing with a fellow cowboy.  It’s admiring the Indians, and dreaming of being one himself.  (Though Charlie spent a year with the Indians, the real hardships of their lives didn’t seem to register with him.  For Charlie, American Indians represented a dream of freedom and open plains and boyish thoughts of how colorful and cool they were.)  Charlie’s letters are decorated with drawings of campfires and sunshine and wide vistas and male camaraderie.  He loved the horses, the cows and the buffalo, and felt connected to the wildlife of the West.  (In large cities, he visited zoos to feel more at home.)  His ideas of the West are to us more Gene Autry and Roy Rogers than Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone.  His was an eternal boyhood – both promise and nostalgia at the same time.  The West (and his boyhood) became to him a Lost Eden which he missed and to which he could never return.

Like many men who don’t grow up, he remained a boy a very long time indeed, and then spent the rest of his life thinking about it.  Charlie felt a strong, almost brotherly connection to anyone who felt the same way about the West.  His affection for this lost time and place led to its share of eccentricities (he wore a cowboy hat, sash and scarf until the end of his life) but it was the wellspring of his art.  He was what he thought himself … a cowboy artist.

The Working Artist

Plate from the Charles Bargue drawing course.

In a time when “inspiration” is all and execution and technique suspect, it is useful to remember the training artists underwent in much of 19^th Century Europe.  Artists were trained at academies, where the work was rigorous and the competition for prizes was fierce.  It was this training that helped foster an artistic tradition of remarkable technical ability and polish – the fusion of expertise and artistic passion.  That the dominant form of 19^th Century art is now called “academic” is a tribute to this tradition. 

One of the most prestigious schools was the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, founded in the 17^th Century.  To join the Ecole, student artists had to be male, less than 30 years of age, and recommended by a teacher.  The Ecole worked to position artists as more than craftsmen – for, in addition to practical training, Ecole students were taught history, aesthetics, and theory.  This academic curriculum included intensive drawing, from plaster casts and the live model, and students competed for prizes, including the prestigious Prix de Rome (awarded from 1663 to 1968). 

The rigors of competition seem incomprehensible in today’s world of post modern finger painting, but at one time, art was a discipline that required skill, erudition, insight and … endurance.  Competitions would last over the course of 106 days.  For the first lap, 100 artists would have 12 hours to sketch in paint a topic chosen by supervisor.  In the next round, 20 artists would work through four seven-hour sessions painting the male nude.  This would weed out half, with the remaining 10 artists producing an oil sketch in 12 hours on topics chosen by judges.  And then, at last, finalists had 72 days to create a large-scale painting based on the oil sketch.

Happily, there seems to be a movement in the art world (among artists, at least) to move away from the stunted, anti-human modernism and post modernism so prized by dealers and galleries, and return to both more rigorous artistic training and work in a more humanist ideal.  Fine Arts schools, neglected for decades by the art establishment (or, worse, sneeringly dismissed) are now flourishing across the country.  As working artists seek to recapture the expertise of the Old Masters, they find that many secrets have been lost to time.  Work to unlock and update these secrets continues apace, and I suspect that we will see a new flowering in years to come of the academic ideal.

King Lear Reigns Over BAM

It is rare that an evening of theater ends with the audience breathless, weeping or paralyzed by depth of emotion.  But such is the case at the BAM Harvey Theater, where Sir Derek Jacobi currently stars in the Donmar production of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, directed with passion and energy by Michael Grandage.

King Lear is often best enjoyed between the pages of a book rather than onstage simply because it is such a difficult play to mount sympathetically.  Is the text ultimately positive … or negative?  Is it a great tragedy that ends on a triumphant note? Or a view into a dark cosmos where humanity is little more than sport for the gods?

Difficult, too, is the characterization of Lear himself.  Too often he is played in a ponderous manner, as if he were plowing into an earth all too ready to consume him.  The success of King Lear ultimately rests on the performance of the title role.  Jacobi leads a mostly excellent cast, and provides one of the most vivid, human and sympathetic performances I have seen in a lifetime of theater going.

Jacobi’s Lear is surprisingly light on his feet – no aged titan crawling into his grave.  Instead, his Lear is more of a pettish child, full of offended sensibilities and flying into tantrums over wounded dignity.  When his Lear cries, “Where is my food?!” he seems more graybeard toddler than dignified patriarch.  This is a perfectly valid reading of the part; Lear is a victim not only of murderous relatives, but of his own childish behavior.  

Jacobi’s masterstroke is that his approach provides great opportunities for shades of characterization.  His two mad scenes are played counter-intuitively.  On the moors and pelted by the elements, Jacobi whispers to us rather than howls.  Later, met by the now blind Gloucester (the deeply affecting Paul Jesson), he dances around his subject, marveling at the absurdities of life.

But it is perhaps at the close, his sanity restored, that Jacobi is at his most magnificent, and his Lear most human.  Creeping into consciousness, recognizing Cordelia (Pippa Bennett-Warner), he is all too frail, all too vulnerable and completely heartbreaking.  “I am old and foolish,” he mutters, creating a world of feeling with a simple line of dialogue.

Perhaps the ultimate secret of Jacobi’s Lear is simply the inner core of the actor himself.  Derek Jacobi has always subtly emerged from behind an air of quiet decency.  Even when playing villains, his persona is that of a soft-spoken, kindly man, rather than the epic, larger-than-life performer that usually attracts Lear.  King Lear only works as a play if one believes him capable of inspiring the love of Cordelia, Kent, Gloucester and the Fool.  Jacobi is the first performer I’ve seen who has been able to make this key component utterly believable.

Which returns us to one of our central questions – does Shakespeare make an optimistic statement with King Lear, or a pessimistic one?  Grandage, working with a bare stage, does not short-shrift the tragedy of the play.  Indeed, the blinding of Gloucester is one of the most horrific set-pieces I’ve ever seen on stage.  But I believe this production is ultimately one which lands on the side of optimism.  Jacobi’s Lear is a figure of transcendent humanity and depth of feeling.  Indeed, when he believes the hanged Cordelia may be returning to life, it is possible that Jacobi’s Lear dies of joy.  Without removing a stitch of clothing, Jacobi is often completely naked.

Much of the cast is uniformly excellent.  Gwilym Lee is wonderful as Edgar.  Often overshadowed by the more showy part of Edmund, Edgar is the more difficult in that he must make privation and his education in humanity believable prior to becoming monarch at play’s end.  Lee’s diction is superb and he brings a welcome physicality to the role. 

Alec Newman is less successful as Edmund.  It is a spirited performance, but Edmund, incapable of love or human feeling, must be a figure of evil urbanity.  Newman misses the silky, cruel cunning necessary to make Edmund truly captivating.

However, Gina McKee and Justine Mitchell are magnificent as Goneril and Regan, respectively.  Both have an electrifying presence, and each commands the stage with regal disdain.  These, too, are difficult parts, and in inexpert hands, Goneril and Regan come off as villains in an Agatha Christie play (think Diana Rigg in her disastrous turn under Oliver’s Lear).  Both McKee and Mitchell create haunting, brutal, and bewitching sisters.

The same cannot be said for Pippa Bennett-Warner, who is colorless as Cordelia.  Where Cordelia must be transcendent, loving and saintly, Bennett-Warner is simply business-like.  Her only effective moment comes when she plays a corpse.

Michael Hadley (Kent), Ron Cook (the Fool), and Tom Beard (Albany) all deliver expert performances.  However, something must be said about Gideon Turner’s Cornwall.  Turner provides perhaps the most amateurish performance I’ve ever seen on a professional stage.  His look and affect remind one of Keanu Reeves at this most sedated.  Bill and Ted Do Lear might make an amusing parody, but his casting is inexplicable in a production so marvelous.

But the problems with the production are mere quibbles compared to the enormity of its achievement.  During Jacobi’s death scene, there were audible gasps from the audience, and tears flowed readily.  After the lights dimmed, the play was met with (well-deserved) thunderous applause.  During his bows, Jacobi seemed visibly shaken and moved by his experience; he has lived Lear rather than played him.  The crowd would not stop its standing ovation until he came out yet a third time, at which point, near tears, he humbly blew a kiss in gratitude.  It felt like a benediction. 

This is a King Lear not to be missed.