Father Figure

DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE
March/April 2012

Father Figure
by James Panero

George Rutler ’65 is a parish priest who packs a punch.

Every weekend after saying Mass, Father George William Rutler steps out of the Church of Our Saviour and walks across Manhattan’s Park Avenue South to spar for three rounds with a 24-year-old former seminarian. His ring is a repurposed squash court inside the Union League Club, where he is a member. “My face is my fortune,” he jokes, so he boxes with a sparring mask. Still, “three three-minute rounds are more taxing than running seven miles. It’s very cerebral, really intellectual,” he says. “It’s great. You get to punch people—and the exigencies of my profession normally prevent me from punching people. It gives me an excuse, but it doesn’t let me punch the people I would like to. Our Lord said we have to turn the other cheek. That was before the Marquess of Queensberry. I’m quite certain St. Paul was a boxer.”

Don’t be surprised if you find yourself doing a double take, looking up a reference or two and reviewing your mental notes after a conversation with Father Rutler. He speaks face to face as effortlessly as he moves in the ring, with a delivery that both disarms and knocks you out. You might be looking up the footnote two comments back—John Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, codified the rules of modern boxing—while Rutler has already moved on to his next combination.

Topics of discussion might include the depredations of International Style architecture, the teachings of the convert John Henry Newman or a recitation of “Men of Dartmouth” translated into Latin with full refrains. Dartmouth luminaries are never far from thought: the poets Richard Eberhart ’26 and Robert Frost, class of 1896; the Greek scholar Richmond Lattimore ’26; the appropriately named man of mystery James Risk ’37; the Catholic Dartmouth College chaplain “Father Bill” Nolan; and Bruce Nickerson ’64, a BMOC from Rutler’s undergraduate days killed in his prime, flying a combat mission over Vietnam. Each of these figures appears in Cloud of Witnesses, Rutler’s latest collection of essays with the simple subtitle, Dead People I Knew When They Were Alive. (It is his seventh book.)

“You get this constant awareness of history,” says Dartmouth trustee Peter Robinson ’79, who first met Rutler while working as a speechwriter in the Reagan administration. “I can recall being with him in a steam room in the Union League Club and within 30 seconds he was quoting Cato in Latin to the raised eyebrows of everyone else in the steam room. Cato is as completely alive to Father Rutler as Barack Obama—and certainly more respectable.” The same goes for Dartmouth, says Robinson. “To him Dartmouth doesn’t trail off into sepia tones. The whole history and life of the College, it’s all in vivid color.”

Our Saviour, Rutler’s parish of the past 10 years, is a Romanesque limestone pile that wouldn’t get a second glance on the banks of the River Rhone in medieval Avignon. Yet it was constructed at great expense less than 50 years ago, replacing an earlier plan for a glass-and-steel Bauhaus vitrine. The building’s provenance suits Rutler. This one-time Anglican son of Patterson, New Jersey, with an Oxbridge accent, the countenance of a 19thcentury theologian and the face of a Roman bust hasn’t become Dartmouth’s most famous Catholic in any straightforward way.

On the morning I meet with him in the rectory above Our Saviour, Rutler steps out of his kitchen in full clerical collar and cassock carrying two cups of coffee. One mug displays the slogan from the Polish solidarity movement, the other a line by Cardinal John Henry Newman, one of the more famous by the 19th-century reformer: “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” Rutler jokes, “I like to serve my evangelical friends coffee in this.” The mugs seem to represent Rutler’s two sides, the sacred and the secular, each with a pointed world-view. After I suggest his coffee packs its own (bitter) punch, Rutler replies, “I’m sure those poor solidarity guys would be glad to have it.”

As the “baby of his class” who matriculated at 16, Rutler appears ageless and originless, even as he contemplates his own upcoming reunion in 2015. “When I was in college and people came to their 50th reunion [they] were on stretchers. Now I’m getting to the reading-glasses stage. It’s a male crisis thing. I think that’s why I’m doing the boxing.” He runs seven to 10 miles a day. He has defended Mother Teresa in a toe-to-toe encounter with Christopher Hitchens. He ministers tirelessly as the in-house chaplain to the American conservative movement. Still, when he claims, “I don’t like anything that causes perspiration,” take him at his word.

Rutler arrived at Dartmouth in the early 1960s “too stupid to realize how far away it was,” he says. “As a New Yorker, anything above 57th Street is Alaska.” Yet the school took him in, and he became the “kid brother” to many upperclassmen. Too young for team sports, he sang until “I was kicked out of the Glee Club when my voice changed,” he says. Rutler already had a sense of what he wanted do to in life. “I was Anglican,” he says. “I pretty much wanted to be a clergyman. I was set on that, I intuited that. I was very involved in the Episcopal student group.”

After graduation Rutler became the youngest rector in the country at age 26. He served as an Episcopal priest for nine years before converting to Catholicism. “I tell people it was because of the dental plan,” he jokes of his conversion and subsequent years in Rome during the papacy of John Paul II. His conversion came, in part, out of what he saw as political necessity. Always a conservative (a Young Republican in college, he campaigned for the moderate Nelson Rockefeller ’30 when he appeared on campus, support Rutler now regrets), he began to view the Episcopal Church as “Russia after the revolution. It was unrecognizable. The Catholic Church seemed to be stable against the political correctness of liberal Protestantism, which has now disintegrated totally. It was the best thing I ever did.”

Rutler’s ability to meld conservative instincts with Catholic doctrine and an erudite disposition brought him into the orbit of another expertly spoken conservative Catholic, William F. Buckley Jr., for whom Rutler delivered the homily during a requiem Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 2008. The late National Review editor had maintained his offices a few blocks from Rutler’s former parish of St. Agnes, near Grand Central Station, and had connected Rutler with a younger generation of conservative Catholics, including those then emerging from The Dartmouth Review. It is no surprise that Rutler has officiated at every Review gala dinner in New York; hosted the Phrygians at Our Saviour when the Dartmouth senior society, formed around the petition trustee movement, came to town; and is a regular presence at conservative functions far and wide. For a decade he served as the national chaplain of Legatus, a powerful club of Catholic business leaders created by Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan. Then-governor George W. Bush even made Rutler an honorary Texan in 1996. “I have boots upstairs somewhere,” he says.

More than just clerical emcee, Rutler has shepherded a generation of Dartmouth graduates to Catholicism. Through Buckley he lined up a Catholic tutor for the young Peter Robinson as he worked toward his own conversion. “The day I was received formally in the church,” Robinson says, “George came down [to Washington, D.C.] from New York to receive me.” Recently Joe Malchow ’08, who founded dartblog.com as an undergraduate in 2004, became another Dartmouth son taken in by Rutler. “I was raised entirely a-religious, and as a young thinking man I was very excited about my atheism,” says Malchow, who became interested in the church after the terror attacks of September 11. In the summer of 2007, when Malchow was working as a summer fellow at The Wall Street Journal, “Peter Robinson told me, ‘You ought to meet this illustrious alumnus,' says Malchow. “It was the first Mass I ever sat through, and I sat all the way in the back.” Malchow has since undertaken Catholic instruction. “He is not an evangelist,” Malchow says of Rutler’s influence. “He knows what he knows and never once does he lean forward in an attempt at converting you.”

Within his own political circles Rutler can be equally influential. He has come to serve as the conscience of social conservatism and is a particularly harsh critic of the libertarian strain he sees influencing the conservative movement. Even regarding The Review, Rutler says, “They have to be very careful with what defines classical conservatism. The danger is to become postmodern libertarian rather than a real conservative. Where is the whole concept of natural law?” He is no fan of rock music: “People say I am a Cro-Magnon, but anyone who likes it has canceled himself out of the life of the mind.” He also bemoans the general dressing down of once-solemn ceremonies, including college graduation: “Tossing beach balls around is a subconscious realization that college education has become worthless.” Would it be shocking to know that Rutler did not care for the late-night host Conan O’Brien’s turn as graduation speaker this spring? “Mr. O’Brien said that vox clamantis in deserto was ‘the most pathetic school motto I have ever heard.’ Those pathetic words are the word of God,” Rutler says.

“He views Dartmouth College as holy ground,” says Robinson of the priest. “Why would anyone who graduated from Dartmouth in 1965 care two hoots about a commencement address in 2011 if he weren’t madly in love with the place? It’s like Robert Frost’s epitaph: ‘I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.’ ”

Perhaps Rutler’s most famous quarrel occurred in May 2007 at a conservative gala being held at the Union League Club. Following remarks by keynote speaker Christopher Hitchens, author of a diatribe against Mother Teresa called The Missionary Position, Rutler suggested to Hitchens that Mother Teresa was “in heaven that you don’t believe in, but she’s praying for you.” This sent Hitchens into the audience. Words were exchanged, and reportedly the two had to be separated. The two later made up, though Hitchens, who died of esophageal cancer in December, had written that “redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before.”

Death is a part of life for a parish priest. “I had six or seven friends die this summer. It was like a plague,” Rutler laments. Ten years ago, on September 11, Rutler saw more than his fair share of deaths. “I was at St. Agnes then,” he recounts. “I heard this plane and it sounded like it was right over [Grand Central] terminal. I thought, that’s a very big plane, why is it flying so low? And as I was thinking that I heard this distant thud. I immediately knew it hit something.”

Rutler ran three and half miles to the towers in lower Manhattan. “I was right there at the buildings. Everybody jumping. I remember the police going in and the firemen going in. Most of them were Catholic, so I was giving general absolution. Like on a battlefield, you can’t hear everybody’s confession.”

When Rutler went to the old St. Peter’s Church, a block from the World Trade Center, to retrieve holy oils, he saw the day’s first confirmed fatality. It was the body of fellow priest Mychal Judge, the fire department chaplain who became known as “Victim 0001” when he was killed by falling debris from the collapse of the south tower. “The interior of the church was all covered in dust,” says Rutler. “The priest’s body was brought into the church and the policemen were totally in shock. I remember one policeman crying on the steps. They didn’t know what to do, so they put the body in front of the altar. There was a painting of the Crucifixion, given by the King of Spain. It was a very graphic image. There’s the Crucifixion up there, the priest’s body there, and he was leaking blood down the altar steps. He was crushed.”

The memories of that day have kept Rutler away from Ground Zero since the attacks. When we meet, he is planning his homily for the 10th anniversary. Although the anniversary date fell on a Sunday, the church permitted its clergy to replace the standard liturgy with a special requiem Mass for the dead.

“We live as mourners,” Rutler told his parishioners, “never forgetting the wanton rampage of evil on that Tuesday whose late summer brilliance was so affronted by the moral darkness of those who blackened the bluest sky. These days pick up the pace from the pleasant torpor of summer, and on this particular day 10 years later, we also move on into a new decade to engage a cultural war against the moral offenses which have afflicted our time.”

In a world without sepia tones, the past is present and good and evil battle in vivid color. George Rutler sees himself as a cultural warrior in this battle, and he has never been more fighting fit.

Murdock Pemberton: The Art Critic in the Attic

THE NEW CRITERION
February 2012

Shorter Notice
by James Panero

A review of Sally Pemberton's Portrait of Murdock Pemberton, The New Yorker's First Art Critic

If the fate of most writers is to be forgotten, save for a suitcase of mementos moldering in the attic, few will be as fortunate as Murdock Pemberton (1888–1982). Three years ago, Sally Pemberton, Murdock’s granddaughter, found her grandfather’s suitcase stuck in a corner of the Long Island house where she grew up. After prying the lock open, “I realized that every last photo, letter, and clipping was a clue left by Murdock,” she writes. With a “journalist’s bent for solving puzzles,” she set about reconstructing her grandfather’s literary life.

What a life it was. In 1919, Pemberton claimed to have originated the Algonquin Round Table literary lunch with a roast of the critic Alexander Woollcott. Six years later, Harold Ross hired him as the first art critic of The New Yorker. It was a post Pemberton held until 1932, and one from which he both witnessed and championed the first generation of American modernists. “Words of gratitude from Stieglitz and the other artists who became Murdock’s friends,” Sally writes, “attest to the fact that he was a key supporter and promoter of art in America.”

With letters, photographs, and other memorabilia mixed with old columns in a beautifully illustrated coffee-table book, Portrait of Murdock Pemberton recreates the feel of popping the lock on that old suitcase, with Sally’s tales of discovery mixed into the story line. Murdock’s own articles from The New Yorker’s fun Ross years, before the magazine became a monastery under William Shawn, are also a delight. Take Pemberton’s breezy account of a stateside visit by the great German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe in 1928. After praising Meier-Graefe’s life of Van Gogh as “one of the best books we have read in ten years,” Pemberton writes:

Artists the world over will be interested to know that the most exciting American manifestation in the field of art that Mr. Meier-Graefe found was the Ford factory in Detroit. After a whole day spent watching the new model come off the endless chain belt, the critic could bring his mind back to art only with great difficulty. We managed an interview with him in a taxi on the way to see the Grecos at the Metropolitan, which pictures he viséed with a monocle many times.

On August 26, 1932, office politics got the better of the critic, and Pemberton received his walking papers from Ross: “What we are going to do about the art column (to put it bluntly and briefly) is let Louis Mumford do occasional depts, on art, along with his architectural pieces. . . . I’m sorry and, as I said, I’m earnestly hopeful that the decision won’t inconvenience you.”

But it did. While Pemberton followed up with a semi-regular string of assignments for The New Yorker in the 1930s and more irregular pieces in the 1950s and 1960s, he knew he had “missed the bus” on posterity. “When the Wart Essholes, the tomato can genius and the 10 x 30 piece of canvas painted with red house paint came along, I took a sabbatical,” he wrote in an autobiographical note from the 1970s, published here for the first time. Fortunately, Pemberton also had the foresight to put his life in a suitcase and toss it in the attic. It was a career strategy that has now paid dividends, one that more of us might consider.

Gallery Chronicle (February 2012)

THE NEW CRITERION
February 2012

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “MIC:CHECK (occupy)” at Sideshow gallery, Brooklyn; “Gabriele Evertz: Rapture” at Minus Space, Brooklyn; “Lori Ellison” at McKenzie Fine Art, New York & “Halsey Hathaway and Gary Petersen: New Paintings” and “Paintings by Rob de Oude” at Storefront Bushwick, Brooklyn.

I am not the first to suggest that Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the study of price bubbles and other mass misconceptions written by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in 1841, has something to say about present circumstances. Men “think in herds,” wrote Mackay. “It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

Before the downturn of 2008, Damien Hirst appeared to ride the wave of irrational exuberance. Here was the artist of the mad herds. In 2007, he fabricated a diamond-encrusted skull, which he called For the Love of God, and made headlines attempting to sell it for 100 million dollars. Then months before the crash, he unloaded his stock for top dollar at Sotheby’s. Just in time, it seemed, he cashed out in an art world example of the “greater fool theory,” with sorry speculators left holding the bag of his worthless
gewgaws.

For anyone who thought Hirst popped louder than a Vegas exurb after that auction, the past month has been a reminder that there’s still air left in the pneumatic Brit. The dealer Larry Gagosian has scheduled an exhibition of Hirst’s “spot” paintings in all eleven of his galleries spread across eight cities on three continents, with a total of 331 works on display worldwide. Regarding these canvases of colored dots painted by Hirst’s studio assistants, the finest comment has come out of a viral video by the internet personality Hennessy Youngman, who called them a “perfect storm of banality.”

Unlike many of our other toxic assets, Hirst somehow avoided the downgrade of 2008. He has positioned himself as a bubble about a bubble, madness about madness, as much of a statement on popular delusion as a product of it. He designs his artwork to appear valueless—blown-up baubles, useless pills, the trinkets of a carnival midway writ large—then sits back as his prices plump up against all reason. What matters is the way we respond to them. Amplified through a feedback loop of supposed meaning, popular reaction builds into a deafening noise that Hirst and his supporters point to as evidence of his ability to resonate with mass hysteria.

Brilliant, right? Except for one thing: I always thought Hirst was worthless, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who thought otherwise. So where is the madness? It doesn’t exist. It never did. The Hirst bubble was never the product of mass delusion. It was something far less interesting—a fake bubble puffed up and maintained by a syndicate of gallerists, museum professors, PR flacks, art gossip reporters, and moneyed collectors. The only madness surrounding Hirst is the hype they generate for him and our exasperation at the inanity of the spectacle.

And, of course, we always knew that. As the critic Will Brand recently wrote: “I’m going to lay this down, just to clarify, so that nobody from the future gets confused: We hate this shit. Everyone hates this shit. These spots reflect nothing about how we live, see, or think, they’re just some weird meme for the impossibly rich that nobody knows how to stop.”

The Gagosian shows are merely groundwork for Hirst’s retrospective at Tate Modern this spring. The Tate will then promote future sales at Gagosian. And so on. That’s the insidious thing about the Hirst bubble. Unlike a real bubble, we never want to buy in, yet somehow we end up holding the goods anyway, in this case through our public institutions. We did not willingly inflate anything. Instead, the Hirst bubble blows up by knocking the air out of the rest of us. It comes down to a battle over air rights. So many artists are making vital work today. They could resonate the spots off Hirst. They just need their air back.

Sideshow Gallery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (installation view)

Art abhors a vacuum. It needs atmosphere to bounce its energy around. That’s why artists, writers, and videographers are slowly building their own infrastructure to support an alternative ecosystem for serious art. They are finding ways to nurture the art they value most. And little would be possible without alternative galleries to exhibit this work. I have written many times in this space about the galleries in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Yet before Bushwick was even on the map, there was Sideshow Gallery, founded in 1999 by Richard Timperio in the nearby neighborhood of Williamsburg.

For the past twelve years, Timperio has hosted a regular group exhibition at Sideshow that has become a main event in alternative art. Timperio reclaims some air from the establishment’s machine with a spectacle of his own. His group show is a demonstration of the power and the numbers of the art scene gathering across the East River on New York’s Left Bank of Brooklyn—the rising Montparnasse. For this year’s show, on view through February 26, he has gathered over four hundred artists to exhibit their work across every square inch, floor to ceiling, of his gallery’s two-room home.1

The artists here are tied together in more ways than one. This is not some museum curator’s idea of what’s hip this season but rather an organic network that has long been showing and working together, in some cases for over half a century. These artists do not exhibit here expecting to sell. They give their work over to Sideshow to demonstrate their affinity with the alternative scene. On opening night, the line goes around the block, even without advertising or coverage in the mainstream media.

I have never seen a larger gathering of work by great contemporary artists, with many I have previously covered in this column, including Lori Ellison, Tom Evans, Gabriele Evertz, Bruce Gagnier, Dana Gordon, Ronnie Landfield, Loren Munk, Carolanna Parlato, Peter Reginato, Paul Resika, Lars Swan, Kim Uchiyama, Don Voisine, Louisa Waber, John Walker, and Thornton Willis. Then there are artists whom I know better in their other roles—as the critic Mario Naves, the gallery owner Janet Kurnatowski (who, a few blocks away, is now exhibiting her own annual exhibition of works on paper), and Lauren Bakoian, the director of Lori Bookstein Fine Arts.

Gabriele Evertz, Six Grays + B/W (2002, acrylic on wood, 16"x16")

With its crowded bodies and crowded walls, Sideshow offers a must-see exhibition that is a challenge to view. It is an annual conference of alternative art as well as a card catalogue of artists to follow throughout the year. Of particular note this year is the small panel by Evertz, an example of this colorist’s investigation into gray that was the subject of a breathtaking show at Minus Space.2 Landfield’s small canvas reveals the lyrical abstractionist at his finest. Uchiyama’s watercolor on paper was a spare standout. Gordon is a Sideshow regular whose Orphic investigations into shape and color have led him to create some of the best paintings of his career. More of his work will be on display this month at the Triangle Arts Association in a group exhibition called “What Only Paint Can Do,” curated by our own Karen Wilkin.

Lori Ellison, Untitled (2011, Gouache on wood panel, 10 X 8 inches) 

Through exhibiting at Sideshow and Valentine Gallery in Ridgewood, Queens, Lori Ellison is one artist who has used both social media and the alternative galleries to land, after many years, in the catbird seat of public acclaim. For decades she has made wondrous, intimate drawings and panel paintings from the sidelines. Now she is enjoying a solo show at the superb Chelsea gallery McKenzie Fine Art that is a tribute to her dedication and a testament to the emerging dynamics of a new and more open contemporary scene.3

McKenzie has matched Ellison’s recent geometric and biomorphic pen drawings and gouaches on wood with a series of arabesques from a decade ago, some painted in glitter glue. The comparison is interesting. While remaining idiosyncratic, Ellison has clearly distilled out the cuteness over the years, refining her geometry and color sense to create the crackling abstractions we see today. While her works are nothing if not obsessive, they have evolved in a way that speaks to the seriousness of her studio practice and explains how she now comes to have our undivided attention.

Halsey Hathaway, Better Me Than You (2011,  60" X 50" acrylic)

Meanwhile in Bushwick, the Sideshow artist Gary Petersen has found a home at Storefront Bushwick. This is the new gallery opened by Deborah Brown housed in the same location as the groundbreaking space she co-founded with Jason Andrew two years ago—simply called Storefront. As a curator, Brown is a matchmaker, drawing on an extensive network to pair artists across generations. Her first show is a visual stunner, with Petersen’s hard-edged dynamos of swirling stripes matched with Halsey Hathaway’s overlapping disks and, in the back room, Dutch-born Rob de Oude’s moiré patterns of meticulously painted lines.4

Lee Bontecou, Sandpit (2011; mixed media; 24 x 19 inches)

Finally this month offers up our last chance to see the art world’s original alternative in her current show. Lee Bontecou always refused to be taken in. After bursting onto the scene in the 1960s with her singular and haunting wall sculptures of layered canvases, often stitched around gaping voids, she retreated entirely from public view. Yet she never stopped making art. Now in her eighties, she is as inventive and singular as ever. Her exhibition of drawings and sculptures on view at FreedmanArt through February 11 is not to be missed.5

While Bontecou has always been reluctant to explain her work, for her retrospective in 2003 she briefly relented. “The natural world and its visual wonders and horrors,” she explained, “man-made devices with their mind-boggling engineering feats and destructive abominations, elusive human nature and its multiple ramifications from the sublime to unbelievable abhorrences—to me are all one.”

Bontecou works at the intersection of man, nature, and machine. Her neo-Gothic, steampunk, post-apocalyptic aesthetic owes something to her upbringing: her father invented the first aluminum canoe; her mother wired submarine transmitters. But even here she resists easy labeling, seeking to occupy “all freedom in every sense.” At FreedmanArt, creations are more undersea than overhead, with delicate ocean crafts suspended from the ceiling and odd plant- and mollusk-like creatures peering up from sandbox dioramas, all paired with drawings of waves, flowers, and eyes.

When Donald Judd wrote that Bontecou can reference “something as social as war to something as private as sex, making one an aspect of the other,” he hit on only two of her many readings. Dore Ashton offered an elaboration. “Far more significant than the obvious sexual connotations so often invoked for her work,” she observed, are the mysterious and ultimately “inexpressible sources of her imagery.”

1 “MIC:CHECK (occupy)” opened at Sideshow gallery, Brooklyn, on January 7 and remains on view through February 26, 2012.

2 “Gabriele Evertz: Rapture” was on view at Minus Space, Brooklyn, from November 5 through December 17, 2011

3 “Lori Ellison” opened at McKenzie Fine Art, New York, on January 5 and remains on view through February 11, 2012.

4 “Halsey Hathaway and Gary Petersen: New Paintings” and “Paintings by Rob de Oude” opened at Storefront Bushwick, Brooklyn, on January 1 and remains on view through February 5, 2012.

5 “Lee Bontecou: Recent Work: Sculpture and Drawing” opened at FreedmanArt, New York, on October 27, 2011 and remains on view through February 11, 2012.