Gallery chronicle (November 2009)

Sam Francis, Middle Blue (1957), courtesy of Glenstone

THE NEW CRITERION
November 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Sam Francis: 1953–1959”at L&M Arts; “Jay Milder: Recent Work” at Lohin Geduld Gallery; “Abby Leigh: The Sleeper’s Eye” at Betty Cuningham Gallery and “Silver Anniversary: 25 Photographs, 1835 to 1914” at Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Fine Photographs.

Even by the exacting standards of the Abstract Expressionists, Sam Francis was an exceptional egomaniac, one of the last century’s great high-flying experiments in self-absorption. Born in San Mateo, California in 1923, he trained as an airman in the Second World War. When this experience ended in a bout of spinal tuberculosis following a crash, he took up painting from his hospital bed. As he recovered, laid out on his stomach and sketching on the floor, he came to see himself as a shaman with mystical powers. It was a notion that appealed to his diabolical nature, and rather than exorcise them, he indulged his artistic demons through thirty years of Jungian therapy (he was fascinated by Jung’s writings on alchemy). “I was a bird,” Francis once said of his earliest dreams, “and my job was to fly around the earth leaving trails of beautiful clouds behind me until the whole earth, the whole sky, was covered in a network of colored clouds.”

In 1950 Francis moved from California to Paris and quickly became one of the decade’s wealthiest abstract artists. Here he lived out his bird-dreams by painting huge lumi- nous cloud-forms, mackerel-sky compositions soaked in rain and infused with light. Acclaimed in Europe and Asia, he developed outside the New York School. Conventional wisdom has it that his Stateside reputation suffered through his absence. Perhaps, but by avoiding the center of post-war abstraction he also avoided its inward pressures. With studios stretching from California to Switzerland to Japan, he managed to float above the fray for his entire career—his powers failed only in 1994, when prostate cancer grounded him for good.

The Francis Zeppelin operated best when fully inflated, and this month we have a couple of opportunities to climb aboard. In 1968 the filmmaker Jeffrey Perkins began shooting a documentary of the artist. Forty years later this project has reached the silver screen with a limited release at Anthology Film Archives in New York in September and film festivals in Naples and Rome. The movie matches recent interviews of Francis’s contemporaries with Perkins’s archival footage. At the heart of the film is an “interview” between Francis and Perkins shot on 16mm in Santa Monica in 1973. Stretched out on a deck chair and talking through his nose, Francis does his best late Brando, one big bloated grin issuing profundities. Painting, he says, “is devotion to the self.” He speaks of “getting back into myself. I had become too extroverted.” While bemoaning the demands on his time, he fiddles with a roll of gaffer’s tape. He also fields unfortunate follow-up questions from his young son Osamu sitting off camera (“What shit?” “Lots of times I say things you say I’m busy.” “Remember when you didn’t want to go play hide and seek?”).

Painful. That Francis was a head case is all too apparent. In terms of making art, the footage in the studio is more revealing. The painter Al Held singles out Francis’s “light, lyrical hand.” Wearing nothing more than white socks, a red smock, and blue underwear, we see Francis walking over his enormous canvases like an out-of-shape Superman on retirement pay, flinging, pouring, and rolling out his paint with the greatest of ease. I am always grateful for glimpses of painters in the studio. With the rise of alternative media, the oil-on-canvas world is ever more rarefied, like the production of artisanal cheese. Filmmakers are smart to capture this world before it dies out. The findings, however flawed, remain illuminating.

Through December, L&M Arts has mounted a medium-sized exhibition dedicated to the art of Francis’s Paris years, and we can take Perkins’s images of Francis’s studio practice to the show.[1] If the Eastern aesthetic is an art of absence, Francis’s appeal to his Asian patrons is readily apparent. In his best work at L&M, like Middle Blue (1957) and Blue out of White (1958), on loan from the Hirshhorn Museum, pools of color circulate in bright empty space. Francis’s lyrical hand often knew just what to leave out. Even in denser compositions, such as Black (1955), white light reaches around his dark forms. The more open the space, the better the work tends to be. In some of Francis’s best paintings (not on display in this show), the pigment has been pushed to the extreme edges of the canvases. In his studio, sometimes Francis really could fly.

If Francis had only stayed in that studio, he would have done a lot less collateral damage. Perkins’s film offers some choice stories of the artist at his worst. Ed Moses recalls that after one drug haze Francis left his wallet containing $32,000 cash in a café (someone returned it). His daughter Kayo Malik remembers smoking pot with her generally absentee dad around age thirteen and attending the Moulin Rouge. Walter Hopps recounts a story of how Francis won over his fourth wife (of five), Mako Idemitsu, by renting a P-38 and threatening to crash the plane into her father’s house unless he consented to their marriage; it so happened that the father, Sazo, was also Francis’s biggest patron—the Japanese oil baron’s foundation, the Idemitsu Museum of Art, still maintains the largest collection of his work.

Today the absurdities of Francis’s life seem almost quaint. On the one hand, the paintings can still appear fresh, if at times a little lightweight. On the other, Francis’s mistreated wives and children might want to ask the Jung Foundation for a refund. You have to wonder if his indulgences were worth it. The art does not always justify the means.

When the painter Jay Milder says that “my work has to do with symbols, not signs,” I think I get it. Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1934, Milder is descended from the Ukrainian Hasidic mystic Rabbi Nachman. He matches his studies in the art of the New York School with an interest in Kabbalah and Theosophy. His paintings, now on display at Lohin Geduld, seem packed with symbols, with bits of numbers and letters layered on top of one another.[2] Milder marks out these symbolic particles with a childlike hand and gobs of paint. The clumsy paint handling, as well as the Cosby-sweater-like color choices, camouflages the complex symbol system contained within. Aside from Noah’s Ark Series (2008–09), which manages a pleasing overall composition, I am not sure I would want to live with many of these paintings. They start out frighteningly overpacked and rather garish. Still they could be the kind of work that, through extended viewing, reveals interesting secrets over time.

Since first taking painting classes with Will Barnet at the Art Students League as an adult, Abby Leigh has been on an artistic journey that I doubt she expected or can even quite explain, which makes her development all the more interesting. As she recently recounted in The Brooklyn Rail: “One day [Barnet] said, ‘You should be a painter.’ And I said, ‘Please, I don’t want to be a laughing stock at 40. Don’t tell me that if you’re just being nice.’ And he said, ‘No, no, I think you should be a painter.’ So I thought, well okay, I’ll give it a shot.” Trained in the theater and married to the Broadway producer Mitch Leigh, who wrote Man of La Mancha and a famous jingle for Sara Lee, Abby Leigh brings a precise hand to her odd and wide-ranging sensibility (her studio is filled with biological specimens). Many of her paintings address the issues of sight. She was, until recent surgery, legally blind.

For her third exhibition at Betty Cuningham, Leigh takes on optical art with supersaturated monochromatic paintings that seem to glow in halos of light.[3] Emerging Thought (2008), in deep red, has an almost synesthetic hum to it, with subtle tonal variations suggesting blind spots and other ocular effects. To this Leigh adds two black-and-white series on paper, one of targets and the other of horizontal bands, both made of smoke. To miraculous effect, Leigh has blown smoke clouds over paper to produce a marbleizing texture. She controls the smoke layers with masking tape. I found the resulting hard edges of the work too rigid. Her technique is innovative, but the overall compositions appear dated. I would prefer to see the subtle variations of the oils brought to the smoke. You never know with Leigh—that could be next, or something else entirely.

One of the finest dealers in early photography, Hans P. Kraus is now celebrating his silver anniversary with a must-see show of twenty-five haunting works from the first photographic experiments in 1835 to the Photo Secession and the Great War.[4] Kraus calls his exhibitions Sun Pictures after a term that William Henry Fox Talbot used to distinguish the products of his new technology from other forms of reproduction: His work was the product of the sun’s rays alone. In many ways Kraus’s exhibition is a celebration of this light. His earliest pieces, Talbot’s Tripod in the Cloisters of Lacock Abbey (1835–36) and Hippolyte Bayard’s Bust, possibly of Alexander the Great, are two spectral examples of some of the first rays of light collected in history, barely visible through the darkness. Both of these early experiments are so fragile that they can only be viewed in near darkness and for brief periods of time. “These are the whispers of the invention of photography,” says Kraus. “The very act of looking at it is creating a chemical reaction.” The dealer keeps the Bayard in a special velvet-covered case.

What distinguishes all of these images from many other early photographs is their high state of preservation. They are not artifacts but still works of art, revealed to us in the state their creators first saw them. Kraus calls himself a dealer in the “Old Masters of photography,” and he has an expert eye for condition. But Kraus also has a sensibility for photography’s wonderment—the translucence of the flowers in Anna Atkins’s cyanotype photogram (“Iris pseudacorus”); the composition of Etienne-Jules Marey’s Plaster Seagulls in a Zoetrope (1887). The strange presence of Charles Nègre’s Chandelier is a special example. In this unsentimental work, which could stand on its own in any contemporary art fair, Nègre has painted in the candle flames. The technique comes out of necessity. Flickering flame could not be captured by early photography’s long exposures. But the result also seems to radiate an unearthly glow. The photograph is a celebration of light, both real and imagined.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Sam Francis: 1953–1959” opened at L&M Arts, New York, on October 15 and remains on view through December 12, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. “Jay Milder: Recent Work” opened at Lohin Geduld Gallery, New York, on October 14 and remains on view through November 14, 2009. Go back to the text.
3. “Abby Leigh: The Sleeper’s Eye” opened at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, on October 15 and remains on view through November 14, 2009. Go back to the text.
4. “Silver Anniversary: 25 Photographs, 1835 to 1914” opened at Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Fine Photographs, New York, on October 14 and remains on view through November 20, 2009. Go back to the text.

Gallery chronicle (October 2009)

 

George Grosz, Nude in Dunes (1948), courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York

THE NEW CRITERION
October 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “George Grosz: The Years in America: 1933–1958” at David Nolan Gallery; “Mel Kendrick: Markers” in Madison Square Park; “Conrad Marca-Relli: The New York Years 1945–1967” at Knoedler & Company; “Leon Polk Smith” at Washburn Gallery; “Carole Feuerman: Swimmers, Bathers & Nudes”at Jim Kempner Fine Art; “Carole Feuerman: Swimmers, Bathers & Nudes” at Jim Kempner Fine Art & “Color-Time-Space” at Lohin Geduld and Janet Kurnatowski Galleries.

Many people have asked me how the art world is doing in the economic downturn. I am sorry to report that the art world died in early August. This tragic event was not unexpected, nor was it unwelcome. The previous several months had been rough. The end came as a blessing.

After the death of the art world comes its afterlife. The silly season that stretched for nearly a decade will give way to more sober reflection. Galleries will continue to close. But we also know that some galleries will survive, thanks to their intelligence and sensitivity to the emerging mood. Several are off to a good start.

One artist whose antennae were always attuned to changing situations was the German Expressionist George Grosz. The artist is now the subject of a museum-quality exhibition at David Nolan. The business of good gallery-making begins with the education of the eye. With twenty-nine Grosz paintings and drawings and a 280-page catalogue, David Nolan is now running his own class in Grosz anatomy.[1]

In the 1920s Grosz lampooned the excesses of the Weimar Republic, corrupt and blind to Germany’s darker forces. He singled out Adolf Hitler for ridicule when the Führer was little more than a failed artist. A one-time member of the Communist Party, Grosz also repudiated his leftist allegiances after a visit to the Soviet Union. Hitler and Stalin came to appear to him as two sides of the same war machine. Rightly so. Yet perhaps most surprisingly, Grosz developed an unalloyed exuberance for the United States. This romanticism emerged first through his reading of popular American literature and developed in dialectical opposition to his pessimism towards the deteriorating European climate.

When an invitation came in 1932 to teach a summer course at the Art Students League, Grosz booked passage the next month on the ocean liner New York. He arrived to the fanfare of the American press. He wrote back to his wife: “I love you, America. I feel like this is my country, I belong here.” He soon decided to emigrate with his family to New York and did so early the next year. Two weeks after his arrival, SA troops stormed his flat and studio in Berlin and declared him an enemy of the regime.

Anti-Hitler, anti-Stalin, pro-America—the trifecta of political astuteness, but a victory that has complicated Grosz’s legacy. Anti-Hitler, good. Anti-Stalin, tolerable. Pro-America, beyond the pale. As Klaus Mann, an exile in Paris, complained in 1936: “He has changed; a very long, very passionate battle has left him tired. He has become apolitical—or is at least trying to be… . He no longer draws: he paints.”

Grosz lived and worked in the United States for twenty-five years. He became one of the earliest high-profile refugees from Hitler. Yet while his audience expected the caustic illustrator to turn his pen against his new homeland, Grosz went about exploring other sides of his artistic vision. The nudes and landscapes that resulted are the revelations of the Nolan show, along with the dense allegorical work he developed in paint.

Grosz could apply his talents for drafting to many styles. The show ranges from black-and-white wartime illustrations to satirical send-ups of Hitler (So Smells Defeat [1937]). He worked his way through the Old Masters, Breugel in particular, by creating pressure-cooked paintings like the infernal Retreat (Rückzug) (1946) with swirling fires, twisted barbed wire, and a shot-up brick wall that has a three-dimensional texture in oil. In Cain or Hitler in Hell (1944), a pile of human skeletons climbs up Hitler’s leg.

That Grosz had a flip side to his dark vision makes him a more complex and interesting artist. His “romantic” American landscapes are as true to their own time and place as are his dystopian images of Europe. Grosz lived on Long Island and vacationed on Cape Cod. He adored the beaches and often painted his wife, Eva, in nude and sometimes erotic scenes in the dunes. The rolling sand and wispy beach grass in Grosz’s landscapes become fecund allegories for a land of milk and honey. As he wrote to his brother-in-law in 1950, “What do you have against the dune paintings and nature studies, they are part of the whole oeuvre—if I hadn’t done them (with passion and love, too), I would not have been able to paint my imaginative pictures, because ‘invention’ is only derived from nature.” He was right. Drawings like Dunes at Wellfleet (c. 1940) and Dunes Cape Cod (1939) are among the best works in the show, and to be blind to them is to be blind to Grosz’s entire vision.

Several shows this month deserve far more attention than space allows, so here are the best of them, however briefly. When I last reviewed the sculptor Mel Kendrick, another David Nolan artist, I objected to the diminutive scale of the work on view. Kendrick is a constructivist who carves an abstract shape from a wood block, then places the result on top of a base made of the leftover pieces. For an artist who likes to show his hand, sometimes the process gets the better of the product. Not so for a set of monumental sculptures now on view in Madison Square Park.[2] Derived from many of the same forms at his last Nolan show, these outdoor giants executed in poured black-and-white concrete are playful exceptions to the cloying piles that normally pass for public sculpture. To appreciate their power, just visit the park with children around. By climbing through every hole and jumping off every shape of Kendrick’s work, they understand the fun of these structures without the need for further explanation.

The New York School artist Conrad Marca-Relli brought collage to Abstract Expressionism. Some of his best work is now on view at Knoedler.[3] In 1967 the critic William Agee noted that Marca-Relli “accepted the potential risks inherent in collage and developed it as a complete pictorial system.” Unlike earlier artists who used collage as fragmentary elements in larger paintings, Marca-Relli created entire collage abstractions. An untitled work at Knoedler from 1952 serves as an example of what he could do. With a white surface covering a black background, Marca-Relli cuts a swirling line across the canvas and pulls the gaps open exposing the black beneath, sometimes turning and re-pasting a white chad back onto the surface. “The limitations of the material acted two ways,” the artist once said. “It confronted me with a problem of solving the shape and reducing it to the simple form that I was looking for. On the other hand, a collage has always been to me a kind of discipline.” It was a discipline that Marca-Relli perfected.

From Malevich to Albers, the square has long been a focus of abstract attention. Sometime in the 1960s, the circle began to receive its due. The simple drawings of Leon Polk Smith from 1968 now on view at Washburn—along with one much larger, shaped canvas—pay homage to the celestial.[4] On a white background Smith collects a handful of colorful circles together in multiple iterations. These dots act as singular objects, but we can also read them as portholes onto larger circles beneath. Smith leaves these forms to be rounded out in our minds, a dynamic that never loses energy.

It is no secret that twentieth-century modernism had a bad body image, as everyone from Picasso to Giacometti beat a psychological reading into the classical form. Look at the healthy bodies of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and realize the beauty that was lost when art turned away from the idealized nude. The sculptor Carole Feuerman has been confronting this development for decades by reevaluating the classical nude in a contemporary way. Her work is now on view at Jim Kempner.[5] Unlike other hyper-realist sculptures, Feuerman is not afraid of idealized form. She specializes in female swimmers. According to the modernist playbook she does everything wrong. Her work indulges in sentimentality. Her materials include hair and plastic resin, which she splashes on her figures like drips of pool water. Not to mention the fact that we haven’t seen bodies this fit since the Fascist summer-carnival sculpture in Zell am See. On the one hand, for all of her technique, I found some of the polychromy, especially in the faces, a little waxen. On the other, a work like Tree (2009), with its swimmer standing on a tree trunk in nothing but a leafy bathing cap, seems like an art nude for the twenty-first century, real and of the moment.

Last June, I mentioned the upcoming exhibition of Tim Bavington’s hard-edged abstraction at Jack Shainman Gallery with some enthusiasm. Having now seen the show, I can say it was a disappointment.[6] Bavington is out to revisit the optical art of the 1960s. Unfortunately, he approaches this task with the gauzy reserve of Gerhard Richter. Bavington’s optical effects are referential rather than internal to his painted form. He reinvestigates the synesthetic link between color and music, but the connections he draws are facile. For one painting, Fell in Love with a Girl (2009), Bavington informs us the work was “named for a White Stripes song” but “inspired by Missoni fabric.” Please, someone send this artist a Scriabin CD.

The abstract painters Joanne Freeman and Kim Uchiyama have organized an excellent group show over two galleries with eye-popping work by Jennifer Riley and Thornton Willis, among others.[7] Allow me to single out my new favorite painting. It is My Beautiful Laundrette (2008) by Stephen Westfall. The colorful work is based on a grid design the artist has been developing for years. What separates Westfall from the old serialists is the way he fits his pieces together, with his square corners coming together slightly out of alignment. One’s darting eyes pick up the differences and animate the frames. Color, texture, and form all come together. It is a mesmerizing spectacle and a vision, I hope, of things to come.

New Yorkers came out by the thousands for the season’s gallery openings, and several galleries mounted strong exhibitions. The death of the art world may be the best thing to happen in years.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “George Grosz: The Years in America: 1933–1958” opened at David Nolan Gallery, New York, on September 16 and remains on view through October 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. “Mel Kendrick: Markers” opened in Madison Square Park, New York, on September 17 and remains on view through December 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
3. “Conrad Marca-Relli: The New York Years 1945–1967” opened at Knoedler & Company, New York, on September 12 and remains on view through November 14, 2009. Go back to the text.
4. “Leon Polk Smith” opened at Washburn Gallery, New York, on September 10 and remains on view through October 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
5. “Carole Feuerman: Swimmers, Bathers & Nudes” opened at Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York, on September 17 and remains on view through October 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
6. “Tim Bavington: Up in Suze’s Room” opened at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, on September 11 and remains on view through October 10, 2009. Go back to the text.
7. “Color-Time-Space” opened at Lohin Geduld and Janet Kurnatowski Galleries, New York on September 10 and remains on view through October 11, 2009. Go back to the text.

All My Sons

CITY JOURNAL
September 4, 2009

All My Sons
by James Panero

Two memoirs of William F. Buckley outline his towering shadow.

A review of Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir, by Christopher Buckley (Twelve, 272 pp., $24.99) & Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement, by Richard Brookhiser (Basic Books, 272 pp., $27.50)

Since the February 2008 death of his father, William F. Buckley, Jr., Christopher Buckley has courted his share of controversy. As last fall’s presidential election approached, he publicly backed Barack Obama on Tina Brown’s website The Daily Beast. He withdrew from writing for National Review, the magazine that his father founded in 1955. Then came Losing Mum and Pup, a tell-all memoir of his parents’ painful sickness and death—a book heavily promoted and embargoed until its publication date. An advance excerpt published as a cover article in The New York Times Magazine in late spring seemed particularly harsh, yet Losing Mum and Pup could not be easily dismissed. The book became a bestseller. Instead of being opportunistic or shameless or even a product of personal or political retribution, the book succeeded on its literary merits.

Losing Mum and Pup is the story of a political leader’s death, deliberately stripped of politics. Some might see this as a disservice or even a repudiation of Buckley’s beliefs. But what results is an engrossing, universal story of a son who confronts the death of both parents in less than a year. The lack of politics also distinguishes the book from nearly all other contributions to the growing Buckley memorial shelf. The spirit of the ailing WFB, the private WFB, shines from its pages. So does the figure of Chris’s mother Pat, the Norma Desmond of New York society, on whom WFB was a doting Max von Mayerling.

The particular resonance of Christopher’s story builds on more than the fame or gossip surrounding his subject matter. “There are seventy-seven million of us boomers,” he writes. “Many of us have already lost the ’rents, and the rest of us will be going through the experience later if not sooner.” Buckley’s story addresses generational division, specifically the divide between the Baby Boomers and the Greatest Generation. In the Buckley household, this divide seems to have been particularly pronounced. The neo-Edwardian WFB led the national consensus against much of what his son’s generation came to represent with its counterculture, its doubt, and its self-obsession. Christopher, in turn, took up the position of his father’s antagonist. “Pup and I exchanged, over the course of a lifetime,” he writes, “letters of deep and abundant affection. But we fought, and hard. Of the perhaps—I’m guessing—seven thousand or so letters and e-mails we exchanged, I’d estimate that one-half were contentious.”

Christopher plays the part of the Boomer con brio, and much of the book relates more to the author rather than to his subject matter. A father now in his fifties, Christopher declares himself an “orphan” after the death of his parents. “Today I got a call, and I cried. Grandfather dies, father dies . . . you’re next,” he writes. Many observations come off as similarly self-indulgent: “I suppose one way or the other I’ve spent a good deal of my life, despite my protestations to the contrary, trying to measure up to my father. . . . I felt—for the first time in my life—entirely independent of paternal authority or rebuke. . . . I stroked [my mother’s] hair and said, the words surprising me, coming out of nowhere, ‘I forgive you.’” For all of the faults he finds in his family, in fact, Christopher comes off worse—I would imagine, consciously so. At the outset he writes: “I hope to avoid any hint of self-pity, any sense that I’ve been dealt some unusually cruel hand.” That Losing Mum and Pup fails so dramatically in this regard elevates his story from cautious encomium to an engrossing discussion of family dynamics, one told through a certain reckless honesty.

The Buckleys’ only child, Christopher begins his story with the illness and death of his mother. Pat was going downhill fast after suffering through amputations made necessary by her poor circulation, the result of a lifetime of smoking. (Is it notable that Christopher, author of the satirical novel Thank You for Smoking, lost both of his parents to complications from tobacco?) A towering figure in the New York social scene, Pat could be one part Lenny Bruce and another part Wicked Witch. Christopher may have inherited his father’s literary chops, but his wounded wit comes off as 100 percent Mum. “One morning, during the Nixon administration,” Christopher writes of one of his mother’s more famous episodes, “the phone rang in Stamford at what Mum deemed an inappropriately early hour on a Sunday. ‘The president is calling for Mr. Buckley,’ the voice announced. Mum fired back in her most formidable voice—and trust me when I say formidable: a cross between Noel Coward and a snapping turtle—‘The president of what?’ To which the White House operator calmly replied, ‘Our country, ma’am.’”

William F. Buckley was only one-half of the family drama: Pat commanded her own marquee. Just as WFB “had a paladin code of conduct that the show must go on,” writes Christopher, “she’d once said to me, only half-kidding, ‘I’ve got the best legs in the business.’” Pat both deferred to and dominated WFB. “She took possession of her husband,” writes Christopher. “And he was desolate now that she had gone. It was only now, seeing him so helpless without her, that I saw the extent of his devotion to her. The phrase unconditional love has always been an abstraction to me. Now I understand. I think he even missed her being cross with him.”

Losing Mum and Pup traces the death of Pat to the descent of her husband less than a year later. “Industry is the enemy of melancholy,” Christopher writes of his father’s philosophy on grief, and in his last year WFB labored over his own mortality. He could be difficult in his own way. He confronted a host of failing bodily systems, brought on by emphysema and diabetes and a lifetime of self-medication. “It was as if his mind were a still brightly burning fire deep within the wreckage of his body,” Christopher writes. The son’s efforts as caregiver often put him at odds with his restless father: “Pup’s daily intake of pills would be enough to give Hunter Thompson pause.” Ritalin and sleeping pills were to Buckley the opposite of recreational drugs. They were his work drugs, an extension of his efficiency, impatience, and control. “Pup’s self-medicating was, I venture, a chemical extension of the control he asserted over every other aspect of his life. . . . I did not, as a young bacchante in the sixties and seventies, absent myself from the garden of herbal and pharmacological delights—far from it—so I found myself in an ironic position, lecturing a parent about drugs. The child/parent relationship inevitably reverses, but to this degree I had not anticipated.”

For Christopher, the necessity of these confessions comes in clear view when he discusses his father’s despondency. A pious Catholic with an ailing spirit, in his final months WFB discussed the ethics of suicide with Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times’s Book Review and Week in Review sections as well as WFB’s official biographer (the work remains in progress). Hours after Buckley’s death, Tanenhaus told Christopher about the suicide discussion and said that he wanted to publish an article in the Times about it. Christopher worried that such a story would fuel speculation about the cause of his father’s death (listed on the official death certificate as “cardio-pulmonary arrest”) and told Tanenhaus that his father’s statements were made to him “in your capacity as his biographer. Not as a reporter for the New York Times.” As his father’s literary executor, Christopher then threatened to cut off Tanenhaus’s access to the Buckley archive if the story ran.

It didn’t, so it may seem curious that Christopher chooses to describe the incident in detail. Yet here he reveals what must be the ultimate intention of writing Losing Mum and Pup: divulging the secrets of his father’s final year so that others will not do it first. This is a book about setting the record straight, on Christopher’s terms. His deployment of the narrative is his own. Yet in his desire to control the story, Christopher is his father’s son.

One might say that William F. Buckley was far more organically than politically conservative. In matters of philosophy and spirit he was an ultimate conservative force, but he was more taciturn in conservatism’s application, especially in his later years. In Right Time, Right Place, his own memoir of WFB, Richard Brookhiser writes: “Liberalism prevailed, Buckley said, because it was socially acceptable. He therefore wanted to lift taboos on thought and discussion; once that happened, elections would take care of themselves.” Buckley left the wonkery and political leadership to others. Looking to his columns for political direction could be like consulting the Delphic Oracle. He wrote no defining political treatise. His literary totality, ranging through letters and spy novels and celebrating the joys of life, good friends, and a love of God, formed an anti-manifesto. Too much of Buckley’s universe was unknown. It needed exploration, not explanation.

And the issue of succession is more easily determined in the realm of politics than in this one of philosophy and temperament. Who would succeed Buckley at the helm of National Review? The answer seemed to emerge in the fall of 1969, when Brookhiser, then a mere 14 years old, submitted an essay reacting against anti–Vietnam War sentiment at his upstate New York school. Buckley ran the piece and began to see a reflection of himself in the budding young talent. By 1978, Brookhiser, by then a graduate of Yale (like his mentor), had already become an editor at National Review. Buckley privately tapped him as his heir apparent.

Buckley’s mentorship of young writers was a defining trait, yet his vitality could often outstrip that of his protégés. “The puer eternus,” writes Brookhiser, “the eternal youth. Hermes/Mercury represented this type in classical religion. The puer is quick, clever, verbal, sometimes shifty. Bill was unquestionably a puer eternus. He would always be on the lookout for others. He had found a number of bright young writers already—John Leonard, Garry Wills, Joe Sobran—and there would be more in the years that I knew him. But I was the one he tapped in the spring of 1978.”

In choosing a successor early on, writes Brookhiser, Buckley may have been reacting against the career direction of his natural-born heir: “Bill’s conservatism and his role in the world had not replicated themselves. . . . Chris shared his father’s convictions, but he did not live them in the same way. He was not on the firing line week after week, as Bill was; as we at National Review were; as I was. This necessarily gave his convictions a different quality. Chris was conservative from habit, more in the manner of my parents (if my parents had been raised by wealthy Yalies). Chris must have decided, very early on, not to become his father. Chris’s decision to go his own way may have added a share of urgency to Bill’s efforts to find a successor.”

Then a decade later, just as suddenly as Buckley had conferred the crown, he took it away. “One summer day in 1987,” writes Brookhiser, “I came back to my desk after lunch and found a surprising letter. It was from Bill, and the envelope was marked ‘Confidential.’ ‘It is by now plain to me [it began] that you are not suited to serve as editor-in-chief of NR after my retirement. This sentence will no doubt have for a while a heavy heavy effect on your morale, and therefore I must at once tell you that I have reached this conclusion irrevocably. . . . You do not have executive habits, you do not have an executive turn of mind, and I would do you no service, nor NR, by imposing it on you.” It is unclear from Brookhiser’s book why Buckley had his change of heart. While Brookhiser offers theories (he did not flatter Buckley enough at an editorial dinner; he disliked Buckley’s novels), one senses that the answer remains unclear to Brookhiser himself.

If the WFB of Losing Mum and Pup leaps from the surface of Christopher’s book, the WFB of Brookhiser’s book is embedded in its depths. But Right Time, Right Place compellingly captures the editorial world of Buckley’s National Review. As a book about recent conservative politics and magazine life, it can be fascinating. While National Review often gets credit for starting the Reagan Revolution, for example, Brookhiser reveals the editorial indecision over Reagan’s 1980 candidacy. “Bill assumed Reagan ‘would come to grief early and drop out,’” he writes. WFB first backed George H. W. Bush.

In the 1970s, Garry Wills, one of Buckley’s most prized protégés, took a turn to the left. The break vexed Buckley, and National Review began running a regular “Wills Watch” (Wills writes about their reconciliation in a recent issue of The Atlantic). The Buckley protégé Joe Sobran then made his own break. After Reagan’s disastrous visit to the Nazi cemetery at Bitburg, Sobran blamed Jews for the media fallout. He began to see Zionism as a conspiracy akin to Communism, and WFB pushed him away. “He imagined that Bill was bullied and terrorized by Jews—the ‘Zionist apparat’ of New York, the elders of Gotham,” writes Brookhiser. “But he was acute about aspects of Bill’s personality. Bill, he thought, rejected Jew bashing because it was declasse, and he cared above all for maintaining ‘la bella figura.’”

“Joe’s fall was personal,” Brookhiser continues. “Joe was his discovery, his protege, his failure.” Brookhiser similarly blames Buckley for the shortcomings in their own relationship: “Bill’s failing (apart from cowardice) was to have made the offer he did in 1978, having wrongly decided that I, at age twenty-three, was the second coming of him.” The rate of apostasy within Buckley’s young circle ran high. It produced some interesting (and also alarming) talent, as protégés became adversaries and attempted to engage Buckley on equal if opposite footing. Though he engaged in no ideological break with his mentor, with Right Time, Right Place Brookhiser now enters those ranks as the reluctant apostate.

Buckley created a personal mythology that he was careful to control. His 2004 “literary autobiography,” Miles Gone By, gathered much of this mythology in one place. A shimmering, 1,000-watt reflection of the late conservative icon that remains the single best book about him, Miles Gone By dispensed with the standard work of history and memoir. Instead, Buckley set about collecting essays from 50 years of his books, articles, and columns “in which I figure directly,” he wrote in the book’s introduction, “sometimes actively, sometimes only in a passive way, but always there.” Miles Gone By began with Buckley’s childhood memory of fireflies at Great Elm, the family estate in Sharon, Connecticut. The chapters then ranged through governesses, sailing, music, his son, wine, parents, Yale, skiing, an ill-advised solo airplane flight, dozens of friends and eminences, language, travel, politics, private clubs, and finally “Thoughts on a Final Passage.” “There would be no point in contriving an autobiography from scratch,” Buckley wrote. “Why? I have already written about the events and the people that have shaped my life; any new account would simply paraphrase these.” Miles Gone By presented the Buckley myth with the magnolias let back in. Buckley soaked his prose in his own blend of perfume, and he cared little about changing the formula.

Buckley exercised as much control as he could over his own story because that control was central to his overall mission. Will, word, and action were inseparable for him, and all were lushly conceived. But he needed to be the one crafting the plot. He bristled at incursions on his authorship far more than at political disagreements. When a relationship took an unexpected turn or a friend was written out, it was done decisively, and on Buckley’s terms.

Which is why both Buckley memoirs ultimately seem so controversial. Neither Losing Mum and Pup nor Right Time, Right Place departs from Buckley’s politics in a marked way, but both books provide what we might call “unauthorized” accounts of the Buckley story. They are products of, at times, seething exasperation with their subject, yet each pays tribute to him in its own manner. William F. Buckley cast a long shadow. In their inability to get out from under it, Christopher Buckley and Richard Brookhiser reveal the height of the figure towering above them.