Exile in Florida

THE SPECTATOR WORLD EDITION, March 17. 2022

Exile in Florida

Palm Beach is more than Mar-a-Lago and hedgerow snobbery

For the New Yorker, touching down in Palm Beach is like visiting Taiwan from the People’s Republic of the Upper West Side. I am here for a few days. So is much of the American conservative movement. We are all fleeing to the sunny island like a government in exile.

Palm Beach is more than Mar-a-Lago and hedgerow snobbery. With a room at The Breakers now running $2,000 a night, I opt for a Vrbo at the Palm Beach Hotel. The old pile designed by Mortimer Dickinson Metcalfe in the Mediterranean Revival style in 1925 reminds me of the faded glory of the Grand Budapest Hotel in its Sovietized incarnation. The exterminator is a regular presence, but the price is right, and I like the overgrown pool deck. I watch a banana blossom shed its petals in the deep end as I read copy for the next issue of the New Criterion. For dinner I join friends by the fountain at Café Boulud, some fifty feet from their room at the Brazilian Court, the Sicilian castle designed by Rosario Candela in 1926. The air is wet with tropical fruit and old money. We admire the pecky cypress boards decorating the building like lace.

Back in the big city, just before my trip, I stumbled through the Columbus Circle subway station. A Putin apologist, a LaRouchite no less, then shoved a pro-Putin petition in front of me: “Will Carnegie Hall Denounce Nazism in Ukraine?” I lined up in the freezing cold on desolate 57th Street — Billionaires’ Row — for the check of my booster status. “How about your third shot?” the interrogator asked me, as I fumbled for my identification and medical papers. I felt like those huddled masses on Ellis Island awaiting the buttonhook to the eyelid to clear them of trachoma. As I arrived at my $250 seat to hear the Vienna Philharmonic, I convinced myself that Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” is worth it.

Now I am having second thoughts. It is 78 degrees and sunny and my first morning on the island. I am off to an “Ideas Summit” organized by the Manhattan Institute at the Colony Hotel. A colony of New Yorkers is more like it. I spot MI president Reihan Salam wheeling in his suitcase. “I’m a New York bitter-ender,” the Brooklynite tells me. “What do you need to do to get a crowd down here?” quips MI chairman Paul Singer. “Raise taxes in New York City.”

MI has brought down the heavyweights for its two panel discussions. For “Understanding America’s Cultural Revolution,” Heather Mac Donald rails against an obsession over structural racism in the museums: “There has not been a single institution that has pushed back against the lie. Even still lifes are coming under attack. They are still lifes, you idiots!”

Christofer Rufo, the David to the Critical Race Theory Goliath, says that Fortune 500 companies are repeating the same mantra: “A series of euphemisms to bully you into submission.”

Douglas Murray then suggests that “America is a projection device. You have to fight over every detail,” or else, “the rest of the world suffers for it.”

“We are headed to civilizational self-cancellation,” Heather concludes.

For a panel on “The Panic Pandemic,” John Tierney suggests that, “Using public health to grow government power and tell people what to do is a terrible precedent. It’s the left’s ‘long march through the institutions.’”

Dr. Joseph A. Lapado, Florida state surgeon general, agrees that it’s been wrong to ride out a pandemic on the lives of the young. At just that moment, I get a message from my daughter’s school that its mask mandate is ending. For the past year I have been insinuating that when her generation rises up to slaughter its elders, she should know that I was against all this. “Burn it,” I text her with a picture of a mask.

That evening, my colleagues and I gather for a cocktail reception at the home of friends. It is Fat Tuesday. A pianist starts playing some Rodgers and Hammerstein. I launch into my rendition of “Oklahoma.” Another singer joins me for some Cole Porter before I realize these are both professionals brought in for the evening and that this is not a group singalong. After the party and a casual dinner, we try to tune in to the State of the Union address. The horrific specter of war hangs over our entire visit, but Ukraine has already become the new superficial virtue signal of the Establishment, which will surely only hurt the cause of Ukraine. We lose our steam just as Joe Biden’s vitamin injections run low. Roger Kimball quotes that famous line from The Leopard, the great conservative novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

The next morning, I walk out to the beach only to be blown inland by a sudden squall. It is Ash Wednesday, and Palm Beach is clearly not as anti-Catholic as it was once thought to be. At the intersection of Sunset Avenue and North County Road, I walk by St. Edward, the elegant 1926 church designed in the Spanish Renaissance style. Edward is one of the patron saints of difficult marriages. As the light changes, I spot a Mercedes with a license plate that says DON. I am reminded of the deposed ruler at the far end of the island. Will he run? Should he run? Will DeSantis run? A vote for “moving on” seems to be winning my straw poll, even if that means the former president should merely move on from the last election to focus on the next one.

Besides, we don’t want to give up DeSantis. Over lunch I see Karol Markowicz, Park Slope’s most famous dissident and a new Boca Raton transplant. She reflects the attitude of many Floridians who have reaped the benefits of their governor’s war with the pandemic status quo. “The moving vans only seem to be moving in one direction,” I observe. Over our lunch with media-in-exile, including David DesRosiers’s team at RealClearPolitics, we give thanks for the wisdom of federalism and the healthy competition of our states. It helps that Danielle Moore, the mayor of Palm Beach, is as cool as a Florida cucumber. I joined Dani for dinner and she tells me about her pet pig.

With what time remains, I take in the galleries on Worth Avenue and get a tour of the upstairs of Findlay, which had the foresight to settle here sixty years ago. I then head over to the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum. Whitehall, designed by Carrère and Hastings in 1902, is one of the most lavish extant mansions of the Gilded Age. This splendid house museum of the industrialist, railroad tycoon and hotelier speaks to the Gilded origins of Palm. Whitehall also serves as the genius loci of this golden island, where the gilding has never tarnished and the sun has never set.

New York is lucky that I like the cold.

The Pan Handler

THE SPECTATOR WORLD EDITION, March 2022

The Pan Handler

In our anemic age, cast-iron pans are just what we need to re-enrich the American bloodstream

I have become a pan handler — a handler of cast-iron pans. I can think of few hobbies that are as rewarding as collecting and cooking on cast iron. Skillets, griddles, muffin tins, Dutch ovens, waffle irons, corn-stick pans and much else: there was a time when America produced the finest cast-iron cookware in the world. The iron ore was abundant. So was the coal to melt it. Foundries went up across this great land. American cuisine developed around it. From fried chicken to cornbread, the American menu should still be cooked on cast iron. Southern cooks never forgot this. The same goes for soul food; black America has always prized its cast-iron inheritance. Now I find I have little need to cook on anything else. I prepare my food in the same pots and pans as my ancestors did a century ago.

My father introduced me to cast-iron twenty years ago, before its recent wave of popularity. One day, he started cooking on some inexpensive pots and pans from Lodge, the one major American cast-iron company that remains in operation today. I was not alone in my skepticism. It was a time when I still believed in “the new,” especially when it came to the kitchen. And cast iron seemed old. It was heavy. It required coats of oil. It wasn’t “nonstick.” It never really even got clean. Dishwashers, microwaves, and soap were all too newfangled for the old cast-iron technology.

Griswold #7 cast-iron Dutch oven, produced by the Griswold Manufacturing Company, Erie, Pennsylvania, between 1910 and 1940.

But what a difference it makes with your food. You can sear meat like nothing else. You can make eggs that don’t taste like plastic because they are not cooked on plastic. You can take it from stovetop to oven to outdoor grill. You can broil, deep fry, stew, braise and bake with impunity. The more you use it, the better it gets. Unlike the modern pan that becomes a flaking chemistry experiment after a few short years — doing who knows what to your own insides — cast iron makes you stronger the more you lift it, scrape it, oil it, cook on it and season it. All the while, the healthy iron from the pan is entering your food. In our anemic age, cast-iron pans are just what we need to re-enrich the American bloodstream.

For over a decade, I have been cooking on my own basics from Lodge. My twelve-inch skillet and reversible griddle are my workhorses, as is my Lodge Dutch oven — a wedding gift from my father. At this point they are caked with seasoning, far from Instagram ready, but they get the job done without hesitation. At the latest sign of flaking, I will rub another coat of lard on them, wipe them down and bake them at 500 degrees for an hour in my oven. I am sure to keep my kitchen exhaust on high and get the kids out of the house (or better yet, use the outdoor grill) for the operation. It is the smoking of the lard that reveals the magic of the pan, as the fat polymerizes with the iron to create its own nonstick coating. Far from a chore, the proper seasoning of cast iron is one of its most satisfying traits as the pan is restored through fat and fire. You can’t do that with aluminum and Teflon.

Griswold #10 cast-iron muffin tin, produced by the Griswold Manufacturing Company, Erie, Pennsylvania, between 1910 and 1950.

“One is considered fortunate nowadays if by chance one of these iron utensils is handed down to them from the second to the third generation,” wrote Aunt Ellen, the popular correspondent of the late, lamented Griswold Manufacturing Company of Erie, Pennsylvania. For those of us with a broken chain of cookware, with the lightweight throwaways of the second half of the twentieth century interrupting our proper inheritance, there is now a robust market for vintage cast iron.

Griswold is the gold standard, with many variations and permutations of design to captivate the collector and help identify model and age. From a simple primitive “Erie” trademark, Griswold started employing a slanted-letter logo, a block-letter logo, and finally a smaller (and less desirable) branded logo. It produced skillets with heat rings and then flat bottoms. All along, Griswold’s manufacturing was more like artisanal sculpture-making than industrial mass production, as molten iron was poured into hollow sand molds. Cast iron is still made the same way today, but Griswold did it more delicately than anyone else, with crisp lettering and polished surfaces that left no trace of the textured sand.

Square waffle iron with high base, patented February 22, 1910, produced by the Wagner Manufacturing Company in Sidney, Ohio.

To add to the intrigue, as Griswold upgraded its designs, its old molds might be reused by another company, resulting in “ghost Erie” markings appearing behind the logo on Wapak and other pans. Sometimes foundries would also mold and cast competitor pans. These old recasts (and, increasingly new, counterfeits) can be easy to spot through their rougher textures. Whether you are a collector of Wagner Ware or smaller manufacturers such as Sidney or Piqua, to help differentiate there are website forums like castironcollector.com that can get as granular as the molding sand that formed these many marvelous items.

There’s much to be found on Ebay, but I have discovered the better dealers on Etsy, where you are a little more assured of a well-restored and documented item. Sure, some of these purchases can run to the hundreds of dollars. But every weekend I now get to use my No. 9 Griswold slant-logo waffle maker for family breakfast. You will never taste a better waffle than the one that emerges from these pristine stovetop paddles that were “pat’d Dec 1, 1908,” as they say right on their face. To these I have added a Griswold No. 7 Tite-Top Dutch Oven, a Griswold No. 10 muffin tin, a Griswold No. 5 skillet, and a Griswold cornstick pan — a gift from my aunt’s mother. What might I go for next? Perhaps an old Erie, or a Sidney Hollow Ware skillet, or a Wapak. Whatever I choose, the great luxury of cast iron collecting is the luxury cooking I can do on it.

Fry bread baked in a #5 Griswold cast-iron skillet.

Cast-iron fry bread:

Ingredients

¼ cup bacon drippings, filtered through a fine sieve or coffee filter
1½ cups coarse-ground cornmeal,
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
1 egg
1½ cups buttermilk

Instructions

I use my No. 5 Griswold skillet for this one. Any smaller size cast-iron pan will do. Scoop the bacon fat into the skillet and heat both together in a 450°F oven. As it heats up, whisk together the cornmeal, flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a bowl. In a separate bowl, combine the egg and buttermilk and pour into the center of the dry mix. Stir until just combined. Now (wearing an apron and shoes) remove the smoking hot skillet from the oven, put it down, and carefully pour in the batter. Return to the oven and bake for twenty-five minutes. Serve hot, even from the skillet, and you will never taste a better cornbread.

Gallery Chronicle (March 2022)

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2022

Gallery Chronicle

On “Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, “Rodrigo Moynihan: The Studio Paintings, 1970s & 1980s” at David Nolan Gallery, “Paul Resika: Self-Portraits, 1946–2021” at Bookstein Projects, “Paul Resika: Allegory (San Nicola di Bari)” at the New York Studio School & “Drawings: Rackstraw Downes” at Betty Cuningham Gallery.

London modernism doesn’t get the same credit as its Paris or New York counterparts. That only means the work of the richly expressive painters of the London School—not just Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, but also Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, and R. B. Kitaj, among others—continues to surprise. “Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting,” at New York’s Mitchell-Innes & Nash, provides a deep dive into the thick impasto of this British painter.1 Born in London in 1926, and focused on the lives of its working-class neighborhoods, Kossoff imparted the weight of experience in the thickness of his line and heaviness of his brush.

Leon Kossoff, Portrait of Rosalind No. 1, 1973, Oil on board, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

The exhibition of sixteen works, ranging from 1963 to 1993, is a revelation of painterly expression. English artists have never shied away from painting the gutter—sometimes from the gutter. Kossoff, who died in 2019, worked to find the beauty in the sewer. He could build up a density of oil unlike anyone else.His Seated Nude No. 1 (1963) is a swirl of flesh-colored taffy; reproductions cannot do justice to the thickness of its paint-handling. For all of its concreteness, this nude seems to liquefy upon approach into a handful of emotions.

As Kossoff moved from the 1960s into the 1970s and ’80s, he began to dig wider, darker lines back into his wet compositions. The gouges gave his paintings their necessary structure, carving in the details of his portraiture and cityscapes without limiting the freedom of his paint-handling. His two tiny self-portraits here, from 1974 and 1978, look like something you might peel off the bottom of your shoe. Meanwhile Portrait of Rosalind No. 1 (1973) and Father Asleep in Armchair (1978) come across as primitively carved relics painted in relief. As he turned to the urban topography of London’s East End, the roughness of this same approach lent itself to his paintings Demolition of YMCA Building No. 3, Spring (1971), Red Brick School Building, Winter (1982), and Christ Church, Spitalfields, Early Summer (1992).

Leon Kossoff, Christ Church, Spitalfields, Early Summer, 1992 Oil on board, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

This must-see exhibition is timed to the release of the 640-page Leon Kossoff: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings by Modern Art Press and is curated by the catalogue’s editor, Andrea Rose. A West Coast version of the exhibition is now on view at California’s L.A. Louver gallery, while London’s Annely Juda Fine Art showed an iteration of the show last fall. Taken together, these initiatives should convince anyone that Kossoff has earned a place in the pantheon of modern art.

Is the School of London having a moment? With “Rodrigo Moynihan: The Studio Paintings, 1970s & 1980s,” David Nolan Gallery gives us a chance to see another artist who kept the oil burning during modernism’s Battle of Britain, when much of the art world had already surrendered to the death of painting.2

Moynihan (1910–90) was a near exact contemporary of Francis Bacon, as John Yau points out in his catalogue essay for the show. “My quarrel is not with the high regard in which Bacon is held,” Yau writes, “but with the fact that Moynihan has not yet been recognized as a major artist. Consisting of self-portraits and still lifes, Moynihan’s late paintings more than hold their own when compared to the work of artists associated with the ‘School of London.’ ”

Rodrigo Moynihan, Roman Head on Newspaper, 1986, Oil on canvas. Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York.

Rather than build up his surfaces, Moynihan plumbed the depths of his compositions. Unlike Bacon, however, his paintings were reserved, intimate, and recessional. Frequently he played with scale and framing, producing pictures in pictures. In the case of Summer Interior, his self-portrait from 1981, he depicted himself in a mirror painting a picture (which, though its back is to us, is presumably of said mirror—and the painting we are seeing now). In his still lifes, he observed shelves of objects at unusual angles. “It was especially important to me not to arrange the still life so as to form a pictorial grouping—a picture,” Moynihan said. “I wanted the objects to be found.” Here the arrangement comes from the way he framed these found objects within his canvases. Table legs get cut off, as in Roman Head on Newspaper (1986). Walls nearly evaporate, as in Sponges Near a Window (1973). Often he used round and oval canvases to complicate his compositions further, squaring the circle and circling the square. Corner Shelf (1974) features a small triangular platform hovering in nearly dematerialized space, placed just off-center in a circular frame. A suite of works on paper, of doors ajar and washes of shadow defining depth, shows how he could do much with little. Moynihan was well adept at modulating tone without turning up the volume.

If the classical artist begins with the past, taking lessons from the Old Masters to advance to a modern style, the modern artist might as well go the other way, starting with the present to approach the Old Masters. This has been the case for Paul Resika. The nonagenarian painter began his training with the modern master Hans Hofmann and has been working back through more classical styles in the eight decades since. This month, Resika’s remarkable range, talent, and self-reflection are on wide display with exhibitions spread across two venues.

Paul Resika, Self-Portrait with Rag, 2017, Oil on canvas, Bookstein Projects.

At Bookstein Projects, “Paul Resika: Self-Portraits, 1946–2021” brings together self-portraits he painted between the ages of eighteen and ninety-three.3 From Titian and Tintoretto to Corot and Courbet, the confluence of styles here seems to span the centuries in a time-traveler’s compendium of work. The salon-style hang mixes up the chronology of these self-portraits as well as their artistic influences. The constant is the Zelig-like artist looking back at us through the years with his infectious appetite for the history of painting—both as Renaissance man and modern master.

At the gallery of the New York Studio School, “Paul Resika: Allegory (San Nicola di Bari)” presents Resika’s latest work, “derived from an obscure engraving made of a panel from an altarpiece predella (ca. 1437) by Fra Angelico.”4 Attributed to Giuseppe Camilli and Giuseppe Morghen, the small engraving is on loan from Resika’s own collection to be paired with the painter’s lush derivations, which he calls “Allegories.” The place to start, as Resika did, is with the artist’s five small study drawings from 2018. Resika breaks down the composition and figuration of the complex Renaissance scene into pencil outlines. The tiny Study #3 in particular is a delight for its simplicity of forms.

Modernism is an editing down, a distillation and concentration of color and composition. In his own modern paintings Resika draws these spirits out of that “obscure engraving” in remarkable ways. A cliffside town becomes an abstracted wave. An island becomes a sail-like triangle. Sometimes the figures in the foreground disappear completely. In one painting, Allegory (San Nicola di Bari) #9 (2019–21), all that remains is a dark blue rectangle in a light blue field.

Paul Resika, Allegory (San Nicola di Bari) #1, 2018, Oil on canvas, New York Studio School.

These allegories help us see the old engraving and feel its spiritual message in new ways. The patron of sailors and children as well as brewers, archers, pawnbrokers, and repentant thieves, San Nicola was the saint whose miracle was his generosity. His secretive acts of gift-giving evolved into our modern-day tradition of Santa Claus, the jolly old Saint Nick. In his own life, San Nicola redirected a shipment of wheat to feed a starving town. He paid for the dowries of three daughters to rescue them from prostitution. On a trip to the Holy Land he saved a ship by rebuking the waves in a storm. The story of the grain and the salvation at sea are both depicted in Fra Angelico’s painting—the second predella painting of the Perugia Triptych, now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana—and the engraving that came of it. Resika is less interested in copying the details of this engraving than in the miraculous expression it conveys. In these allegories he turns the dials, tunes into this message, and adjusts the frequencies of color and form in his own miraculous ways.

For all of the information it takes in, the work of Rackstraw Downes is more about looking out. The artist’s panoramic vision conveys extraordinary details. Yet his compositions are more about space and our place in it. “I draw, not to establish anything, but to gain acquaintance with a place,” he said in his essay “The Conceptualization of Realism” in 1978. “A drawing, for me, is like a first meeting with a person.”

Rackstraw Downes, Looking Down from the Window of a Friend’s on the Upper West Side, ca. 1975, Graphite on manilla paper. Now on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York.

An exhibition of these drawings, pairing compositions from the 1970s and ’80s with current work, is now on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery.5 Composed from direct observation rather than photographs, these drawings amplify our sense for seeing—and feeling—in space. In Looking Down from the Window of a Friend’s on the Upper West Side (ca. 1975), the sight of the apartment windows across the rooflines reminds us of our vertiginous perspective. In Drawing for a Soft Ground Etching: Scaffold Round the South Tower of the St. John the Divine (1984), the scaffold and trees of the cathedral loom over the infinite lines of Amsterdam Avenue on which we stand. In Presidio Cell Tower (2005), the hillside paths and slender tower seem like a landscape in miniature—a diorama in which to wander.

It is said that our mobility affects our sense of space. As Downes’s life turned increasingly inward in 2020, his compositions closed in. Chairs and other props now fill the voids of his studio. Even the air, seemingly so crystal clear in earlier work, becomes thick. As the pandemic has set new limits, these latest drawings by the eighty-two-year-old artist, increasingly housebound in his SoHo loft, convey the stifling sense of a new reality.

Afinal note about Fred Gutzeit, a painter who died in early January at the age of eighty-two. For over fifty years he drew the ripples of art. A retrospective last fall at Catherine Fosnot Art Gallery and Center in New London, Connecticut, began with Tree, Field, and Minnows, a tranquil reflection on a pond from 1966, and followed his work through increasing reverberations and complexities, ending with abstractions such as Future Life Puzzle (2020). I first wrote about the ripple effect of Gutzeit’s compositions in his “SigNature” series, with its abstracted script refracted through psychedelic patterns, in my “Gallery chronicle” of October 2012.

Fred became a regular correspondent of mine. His interactions felt like they were part of his artistic project—a rippling out of interpersonal feeling. He devised projects to spread art by mail. His generosity also spoke of an independent spirit that reflected the hardscrabble Bowery scene in which he lived and worked. Just before his death, what proved to be his final letter to me suggested we put a show together of Bowery artists—a “democratic” show, he wrote, of “artists who have been citizens of the Bowery.” He shared a print of a Miller High Life can crushed on the pavement, which he called “my most iconic Bowery painting.” The image proved to be a memento mori—a sensibility never far from the Bowery street and Fred Gutzeit’s deep understanding of it.

1. “Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting” opened at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, on January 13 and remains on view through March 5, 2022.

2. “Rodrigo Moynihan: The Studio Paintings, 1970s & 1980s” opened at David Nolan Gallery, New York, on January 20 and remains on view through March 5, 2022.

3. “Paul Resika: Self-Portraits, 1946–2021” opened at Bookstein Projects, New York, on January 14 and remains on view through March 4, 2022.

4. “Paul Resika: Allegory (San Nicola di Bari)” opened at the gallery of the New York Studio School on January 31 and remains on view through March 6, 2022.

5. “Drawings: Rackstraw Downes” opened at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, on January 27 and remains on view through March 19, 2022.