'Seeing it his way'

NATIONAL REVIEW
November 21, 2005

'Seeing it his way'
a review of 'Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour: 1909-1954,' by Hilary Spurling (Knopf, 544 pp., $40)

by James Panero

`The creators of a new language," said Henri Matisse, "are always fifty years ahead of their time." Matisse insisted on seeing the world on his own terms--and that choice, which he followed dutifully and doggedly, put him at odds with just about everyone and everything in his native country: the theorists, the politicians, the establishment, the avant-garde, and especially his fellow artists.

Matisse was the 20th century's great colorist; this we know. But what we did not know, until now, is that the abundant joys in his work emerged out of an armored spirit. "What I want is an art of balance, purity, an art that won't disturb or trouble people. I want anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose in my paintings." Luxe, calme, et volupt‚: For this France lined up against him.

These revelations are the take-away of the second volume of Hilary Spurling's life of Matisse, the sequel to her 1998 Unknown Matisse. Matisse once described his paintings as "the energy of a drowning man whose pathetic cries for help are uttered in a fine voice." Such cries were ridiculed by the Paris art world when they were not simply ignored; the solace Matisse did find, outside of his work, came from collectors and critics in Russia, England, and the United States. (Late in life he regretted never relocating to New York, and encouraged American artists to stay put rather than come to Paris. The eclipsing of Paris and the rise in the 1950s of the New York School, which would be so influenced by Matisse, proved it was good advice.)

Spurling writes that "the longstanding, at one time almost universal, dismissal of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century as essentially decorative and superficial is based, at any rate in part, on a simplistic response to the poise, clarity, and radiant colour of Matisse's work that fails to take account of the apprehensive and at times anguished emotional sensibility from which it sprang." We now have two thoroughly researched volumes as a corrective to these failures--by a British biographer who eschews both academic nonsense and art-world prejudice.

Matisse begins Volume II in 1909 as a beast--a fauve--in the eyes of the French establishment. "Harmony--the goal Matisse desired more passionately than any other--was the last thing his art conveyed to his contemporaries . . . [His work] violated every sacred Beaux-Arts precept enshrined in the flawless public nudes that filled the Paris salons." By 1954, Matisse is dismissed by a younger generation for having become a "spent force," lumped "with the reactionaries" because he refused to embrace the theories of the times. "From Bloomsbury's point of view, the wrong people liked him." In Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, Matisse "emerges as a fictive monster of insufferable vanity, banality, and pretension." At one moment he is held in contempt "on the grounds that anyone not lined up alongside the Cubists or the Futurists was against them." At another, French Communists are promising, once in power, to turn his Catholic chapel at Vence, for which he designed the stained-glass windows, into a dancehall. Battered from all sides, Matisse almost never caught a break.

One has come to expect the story of modern art to be solid left-wing territory, but the evidence does not always bear this out. As uncovered by Spurling through an unprecedented array of primary sources, the story of Matisse--one of our greatest modern masters--is less Marxism than Reaganism. Matisse suffered for his politics, specifically because he had none: "Art for him had no political dimension." Matisse was driven by a temperament that was deeply conservative, deferential toward the art of the past. From Byzantium to North Africa to Old Believer Russia, not to mention Poussin, Courbet, Renoir, and C‚zanne, Matisse cultivated the essential qualities of lost aesthetics. His colorist style, stitched together by pattern and ornament, became a personal art academy far more academic than the salon styles of Beaux-Arts.

Matisse did not carry on liaisons with his models; he painted them. He did not live la vie de BohŠme; he moved his family to the Paris suburbs. In Tangier, "none of the standard forms of addiction or debauch could hope to match the risk and lure of painting." Matisse's drive to see his vision realized was often interpreted as madness by his contemporaries, and became a cause of desperation among his wife and children--his wife Am‚lie left Matisse in old age, finally broken by a lifetime of abandonment for art's sake. But Matisse was not fundamentally radical. He was, if anything, radically fundamental.

Matisse thoroughly repudiated the "international avant-gardes," group artists who terrorized talent when not painting by numbers. Cubist thugs were known to spray-paint anti-Matisse graffiti throughout Paris. (It should be noted that Picasso himself stayed above this; he knew Matisse was on to something, and he used their friendship to discover, for himself, what it was.) Matisse chose to work and live "without a theory"-and, therefore, without a following.

The results left Matisse open to persecution, both political and aesthetic. In addition to his offence-at Vence--of aligning art with the Church, Matisse once said of the art wonders of the Soviet Union: "I'm ready to paint as many frescoes as you like, only remember, it's no good asking me to paint hammers and sickles all day long." At the turn of the century, when polite Parisian society was shunning this fauve, two Russian businessmen became active supporters of Matisse's vision. One of them, Sergei Shchukin, commissioned some of the master's best-known canvases, including "The Dance" and "Music." So well known was this collection in Russia that Lenin himself had it confiscated during the Revolution. The paintings were "designated a teaching aid to demonstrate the decadence and corruption of the West" before being locked away from public view entirely.

Regrettably, in her extraordinary coverage of Matisse's life, Spurling gives short shrift to the life around him, and at times distracts us from his work. The real life of Matisse is what you find in his painting and sculpture. Spurling labors both to defend and to overcome the image of Matisse as a proper gentleman, but he was, in the end, a perfectly proper gentleman--one who created astonishing paintings. Where Spurling endeavors to describe every model who walked into Matisse's life, and every liaison that wasn't, the book runs long--particularly in the early chapters on the artist Olga Meerson. The narrative here also does not benefit from Spurling's at times florid language: "he responded like a man coming back to life again, or a lover receiving the advances of an irresistibly seductive mistress."

It is the highlights of Matisse's production--the Barnes murals, the Vence chapel, and the paper cutouts--that keep us on our toes. Confined by illness, Matisse spent his final bed-ridden years cutting and pasting bits of colored paper. What was thought to be madness led to some of his greatest work. This is the history of Matisse we must know.

Spurling's curatorial work may be the most rewarding aspect of her biographical research: To comprehend a great painter, one really must see the great paintings. Spurling has obliged by creating an eye-opening exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which ran this summer. Titled "Matisse, The Fabric of Dreams: His Art and His Textiles," the show paired Matisse's paintings with his collection of textiles--he was the son of weaver, born in a weavers' town in northern France. The results of this completely original show not only demonstrated the influence of textiles on Matisse's art, but suggested how the patterns and colors of textiles encouraged this artist to see the world his own way. Fifty years after his death, we are just learning to see it that way too.

'The music teacher'

NATIONAL REVIEW

'The music teacher'
by James Panero

a review of 'Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts' (Kultur DVD, $149.95)

May 23, 2005

HERE is a recipe for a sure-fire television flop: Pack 3,000 children into a concert hall and have them sit perfectly still. Check. Perform classical music for an hour. Check. Hire conductor with self-described "lurking didactic streak" to work up music lessons and narrate instruction. Check. Use terms--such as "bitonality," "intervals," "glissando," and "whole-tone scale"--that even most educated adults don't know. Check. Inform audience that "My baby does the Hanky Panky" was written in the Mixolydian mode. Check. Perform Haydn's Symphony No. 88, elicit applause, then exclaim, "Well, it was all wrong!" Check. Ask children to get out "paper and pencils, please" in order to identify the composer, nationality, date, style, and form of two pieces--then perform a Mozart sonata and Prokofiev's Classical Symphony back to back. Check. Insist that Rossini's William Tell Overture has nothing to do with The Lone Ranger but consists merely of "Cs and As and Fs and even F sharps and E flats." Check. Explain: "No matter what stories people tell you about what music means, forget them. Stories are not what music means. Music just is." Check. Now combine these ingredients into 53 hour-long concerts performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and broadcast them in prime-time and weekend timeslots on CBS: Guaranteed to fail.

Well, Max Bialystok: Meet Leonard Bernstein.

Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts aired over 14 seasons from 1958 to 1972 and were broadcast in nearly 30 countries. The show became a smash hit with over 20 million viewers--beating out Bonanza in Europe--and the high-water mark of network-television programming. Parents famously signed their children up for the concert series at birth. Through television Bernstein fathered a generation of classical-music lovers. You might just be one of them.

Twenty-five hours of the Young People's Concerts have now been released on DVD. The news should not be taken lightly. It should rather be taken as a cue to throw down this magazine and order your copies immediately. As a boon to home-schoolers and to parents concerned with the state of music education today, these DVDs will be invaluable. Just about anyone--adults and children alike--will find a great deal to take away from the episodes. Bernstein's convincing theories on the connection of folk music to national style are just one example (Episode 9: "Folk Music in the Concert Hall"). The series also includes complete performances of Stravinsky's Petrouchka (Episode 11: "Happy Birthday, Igor Stravinsky") and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 9 (Episode 19: "A Birthday Tribute to Shostakovich"); Aaron Copland guest conducts part of his Symphony No. 3 (Episode 2: "What is American Music?").

The appearance of the episodes improves as the series progresses. The foggy black-and-white episodes from Carnegie Hall in 1958 give way to the result of the millions of dollars' worth of equipment commandeered for the Philharmonic Hall shoots of the early 1970s. But while the clarity of the video track depends on the technologies of the day, the remastered sound of the New York Philharmonic is of consistent high quality. For the run of the show the format of the episodes remained the same, with Bernstein and director/producer Roger Englander maintaining the effect of live performance by eschewing studio work and postproduction editing.

(The shows' simplicity was deceptive; each episode required over a month to write, with that second-oboe close-up and audience cut-away shot timed perfectly to the music.)

"If you get all that," Bernstein announced in one episode, "you're the future conductor of the New York Philharmonic." He meant it. The success of the Young People's Concerts depended not only on the receptivity of a certain television audience but also on Bernstein's commanding presence and his faith in innate musical intelligence. He appealed to adults as well as children and differentiated little between his writing for children and the work he had done for an earlier, purely grown-up show he created in the 1950s. The music critic Tim Page remarked that "one senses that Bernstein presumed a greater musical knowledge on the part of his audience of children than most professional critics in the twenty-first century would presume their grown-up readers to have."

The maturing sensibilities of Bernstein's daughter Jamie, his narrative foil, represent the one arc that contributed to the increasing complexity of his lessons. She was six when the episodes started and a teenager plucking a Beatles tune on her guitar by the end. (That's how we arrive at the answer to the question posed in Episode 20: "What is a Mode?" A mode, it turns out, is the basis of understanding Lennon/McCartney's "Norwegian Wood.")

As he revealed in such books as his 1959 Joy of Music, Bernstein became obsessed with musical pedagogy. He despised what Virgil Thompson once called the "music-appreciation racket," and warned of the "music-appreciation appreciation" racket. He worried that music--"with its concentration of shapes, lines, and sonorous intensities"--might be fundamentally unexplainable. He said intelligent commentary on music was rare, "even among first-class writers": "The Huxleys and the Manns of this world are few and far between." To this we might add the Bernsteins of the world.

Of course Bernstein's lurking didactic streak hit the wrong note more than once. His urge to educate saw him through six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in which he eagerly grafted a culturally relativistic theory of music onto Noam Chomsky's Language and Mind--regrettable, especially since Bernstein gave up writing his Young People's Concerts to prepare them.

Lenny also famously hosted a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party in 1970 that became the talk of the town and the subject of Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic. The parallels between the final episode collected on these DVDs, "Fidelio: A Celebration of Life," and Bernstein's Panther fundraiser are all too clear: In the plot of Beethoven's opera, Leonore, Florestan's wife, disguises herself as a man named Fidelio, and attempts to rescue Florestan from a Spanish prison in which he is being wrongly held for political reasons. The echoes in Fidelio of Bernstein's own contortions to raise bail money for Dhoruba Bin Wahad and the Panther 21 are uncanny.

Bernstein could teach Beethoven, but could not learn from Beethoven. Only Bernstein knows for sure whether this lurking didactic streak prevented him from composing his own great symphony and leaving a more lasting musical legacy. His most famous composition remains the score for West Side Story, a work of popular theater written by a young man.

As conductor, composer, pianist, and educator, Bernstein struggled to be all things. A clue to this conflict comes in the form of Bernstein's empathetic episode--the most personal of the series--on Gustav Mahler. A champion of Mahler's rich orchestral work, as conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Bernstein brought Mahler back to international prominence after Nazism and the atonalities of 20th-century music had pushed the Romantic (and Jewish-born) composer into obscurity: "Some people say that Mahler's own music sounds too much like all the composers he used to conduct. Naturally, I don't agree ... Still, I admit it's a problem to be both a conductor and a composer. There never seems to be enough time and enough energy to be both things. I ought to know. Because I have the same problem myself. They are both one fellow called Mahler, or Bernstein. He was a double man in every single part of his musical life."

In writing television for children, Bernstein became whole, producing episodes even after he had stepped down as director of the New York Philharmonic in 1969. In the end he composed something more lasting than a symphony. According to Glenn Gould, "in the best and strictest sense of the phrase, [Bernstein had] 'done a great deal of good.'"

The resonance of the Young People's Concerts can be summed up in a coda that took place in Denver in 1960: A boy of four or five bounded over to Bernstein in a park and hit him. When he asked the boy why he did it, the child responded: "You didn't say good night to me! ... You were talking about Mahler!"

"Who is Gustav Mahler?," broadcast on February 7 that year, had run over.

'Dutch boy paints'

NATIONAL REVIEW
February 28, 2005

'Dutch boy paints'
a review of 'De Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan' (Knopf, 752 pp., $35)

by James Panero

The American painter Willem de Kooning escaped Marx only to be done in by Freud. De Kooning enjoyed little time--perhaps only a few years in the late 1940s--between the maturation of a personal style, free of Depression-era politics ("We divorced politics from our art, although we were political," he once said), and his leveling by drink and fame. "I saw Jackson in his grave," he proclaimed at Jackson Pollock's funeral. "And he's dead. It's over. I'm number one." That was in 1956. He was already in decline.

It is hard to feel sorry for de Kooning. Add up the mistresses, abortions, and outbursts, and "Bill" comes off as The Great Cad. This is perhaps the lasting value of a new biography by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, art critics for New York magazine and Newsweek, respectively, who chronicle de Kooning's dalliances in excessive detail. For money and women, de Kooning immigrated from Holland to New York stowed away in a ship's boiler room; and he never seemed to care for much more. Once he had acquired both, in the 1960s, his art lost its snap of urgency. De Kooning was a product of his age, and he inhabited his time and place with little apparent self-awareness. Critics like Harold Rosenberg praised him for the same reasons that drove him to excess. De Kooning was hailed as an id with a paintbrush; for a few moments this id was the darling of the art world, for which fame he is now best remembered, more than for his achievements on canvas.

But the life of de Kooning now seems somehow less interesting than the life around de Kooning, so thoroughly documented by Stevens and Swan: poverty in Rotterdam, his tyrannical mother, the Dutch academies, modernism in '40s New York; the art of Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, and John Graham (early influences); and the selling of American art in the 1950s and 1960s.

De Kooning's childhood reads as though it were tailor-made for movies; Stevens and Swan write with a cinematic eye, if not a critical one. Painting for de Kooning began not as a means of expression but as an escape from it. The art world in Holland provided him with academic discipline and a retreat from home life. The authors quote appropriately one of T. S. Eliot's comments about poetry, one that could apply equally to de Kooning's first encounters with art: "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

De Kooning took refuge in the labors of art. He found early work in Dutch department stores and in commercial design. The style then in vogue was Nieuwe Kunst-the Dutch version of Art Nouveau. One of the revelations of this biography is how the sensuous surfaces of Art Nouveau, not to mention its commercial applications and faith in "art for art's sake," fundamentally affected de Kooning's art throughout his career. It saved him from the political pitfalls of the 1930s, certainly. (The like-minded Gorky put it best: "Proletariat art is poor art for poor people.") Art Nouveau also distanced de Kooning from the more spiritual painters of the New York School--Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, for example, who drew on the Symbolist traditions of 19th-century art. While they looked for depth in abstraction, de Kooning attacked his surfaces, obsessively.

"His unashamed celebration of painterly richness," write Stevens and Swan, "especially the whipped-up surfaces and strange pastel tonalities in his art, may stem partly from the hothouse cultivations of the time." Undoubtedly Art Nouveau led to Painting (1948), de Kooning's great early achievement, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This painting's ominous squiggles marching out of the picture plane "confounded the systematic, rational construction of space," writes one art historian, in a way that went beyond Cubism. Painting was de Kooning's breakthrough, and an appropriately titled one.

By mid-century, de Kooning had turned not only to the figure but also to autobiography; specifically, to his obsession with sex. He combined the techniques developed in Painting with the diabolical image of a woman--some say of his wife Elaine. Woman I (1950-1952), and the whole series of Women paintings from the period, became de Kooning's signature work. Woman I, alone, took two years to complete.

As novel as these paintings might have been-some critics believe they were less persuasive than Painting--indulgence was beginning to spoil de Kooning's freshness. "Woman I still appears eternally out of place," write Stevens and Swan, "homeless among the masterpieces at the Museum of Modern Art. Woman I'is personally, socially, culturally, and artistically fraught with uncertainty." Harold Rosenberg, a natural salesman who had developed such icons as "Smokey the Bear" for the Advertising Council, turned de Kooning's obsession over the Women paintings into art-world mythology. If "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event," as Rosenberg famously pronounced, then de Kooning was producing quite a show.

It was bad advice. Expressionism for its own sake, which ran counter to Eliot's admonition for "an escape from emotion," soon overtook de Kooning's art and life to the point of farce. Stevens and Swan write that he "appeared to be a textbook case for Freudian analysis, so fashionable at the time. Not only was he often blocked and subject to anxiety attacks, but all the world seemed to know that he had titanic problems with his mother." While Elaine stood by, de Kooning ran through one young woman after another; when he was not sleeping around, he was often drunk and abusive. He was art's number one for a short time, but he fast became the end of something and not the beginning: the end of sexed-up abstraction, the end of expressionism, the end of the New York School, the end of the id. The art world slowly turned against him. De Kooning devised his dream house and made plans to move to The Springs--Pollock's old town near the Hamptons--which he eventually did.

De Kooning outlasted almost everyone, dying in his studio on March 19, 1997, after more than a decade of "Alzheimer's-like dementia," during which he had continued to paint with the aid of assistants (not to mention Elaine, his dealers, and his lawyer). As he slowly cleared his late canvases of expression, he returned to where he had started--to Art Nouveau. But his achievements after the mid-1950s were minor. Reflecting on Gorky, Kline, Pollock, Rothko, and the other painters of his generation who died in their prime, one wonders whether de Kooning's reputation would have better survived had he not. My guess is no. As he became Abstract Expressionism's Living Master, and a profitable one producing salon work, he was able to cement a reputation he never fully deserved.

Stevens and Swan make few distinctions between good and bad de Kooning. In compiling this document of facts, the writers have abdicated to others their responsibilities as critics, and the book suffers for it. Their writing wisely avoids the jargon of theory, but too often lapses into such groaners as the following: "The unsettling power of the pictures--and their originality--lay in their way of mimicking the sexual act itself. It almost seemed as if the artist were screwing the women rather than painting them."

What finally makes the book worthwhile is the mass of detail the authors have dug up about de Kooning's work, especially concerning his "cuisine of art." His selection of paint, and his "novel use of sunflower oil, water, and benzene," distinguished de Kooning as a painter's painter. His talent was not for life but for canvas; if only he could have better distinguished between the two, he might have truly become an "American Master."