orange-tinted glasses

Happy Birthday—Robert Penn Warren

Evening Hawk (1975)
by Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989)
From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds, Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding The last tumultuous avalanche of Light above pines and the guttural gorge, The hawk comes. His wing Scythes down another day, his motion Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear The crashless fall of stalks of Time. The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error. Look! Look! he is climbing the last light Who knows neither Time nor error, and under Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings Into shadow. Long now, The last thrush is still, the last bat Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom Is ancient, too, and immense. The star Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain. If there were no wind we might, we think, hear The earth grind on its axis, or history Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

Margaret Thatcher 1925–2013

On Compassion

Compassion isn’t determined by how much you get together demonstrations in the street to protest to government that government, which is other tax-payers, must do more. It’s determined by how much you are prepared to do yourself. Of course we have basic social services, we will continue to have those, but equally compassion depends upon what you and I, as an individual, are prepared to do. I remember my father telling me that at a very early age. Compassion doesn’t depend upon whether you get up and make a speech in the market-place about what governments should do. It depends upon how you’re prepared to conduct your own life, and how much you’re prepared to give of what you have to others.

 

On Deterrence

The purpose of defence is to keep peace, not at any price, but peace with freedom and justice. To do that you have to deter a potential aggressor, to stop him from being tempted to use his armaments to attack us. Weakness would tempt him. Strength stops him. To deter him you have to be strong enough at each and every level of armaments to stop him from using his on us. So if we go down in our nuclear or conventional armaments—and we want to get both down—then we do so on condition that he comes down as well, so we always keep this balance of deterrence. To do anything else would be to be weaker on our part leaving him stronger, and that would be more likely to put peace, freedom and justice at risk than to keep it.

From a 16 January 1983 interview on London Weekend Television "Weekend World"

Girl of a Hundred Lists

Recently Read—with capsule reviews

The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translation by Constance Garnett

I have read this most Russian of all novels before but I did not remember it being so funny. Book II: An Unfortunate Gathering is just one example. When his son Alyosha tells Fyodor Karamazov that he wants to become a monk, the uncouth father strides into the cell of the venerable elder Father Zossima and launches into a performance that is as hilarious as it is disrespectful. The buffoonish (his own word) Karamazov is testing, as it were, the elder’s Christian patience and brotherly love. Before the end of this section, Fyodor succeeds in causing both the urbane Peter Miusov, a former in-law who has come along on the visit, and Ivan Karamazov, his highly-educated and aloof son, to lose self-control and descend as well to the level of the ridiculous. After some preliminary sparring, Father Zossima abjures Karamazov to renounce living as a drunkard and sensualist and to stop lying. Zossima leaves the room to hear the petitions of some ladies outside, but the visitors stay behind seemingly oblivious to protocol. Left to themselves, the group profanes the cell with acrimonious exchanges, scandalizes the Father Superior, and mortifies the gentle Alyosha. To top it off, Karamazov refuses to allow his son to enter the monastery and orders him to leave it without a trace. Of course, Karamazov’s sins will not go unpunished.

 

Love
by Elizabeth von Arnim

Elizabeth von Arnim is mainly known, if at all, as the author of The Enchanted April and Elizabeth and Her German Garden. This edition of Love is a reprint by the invaluable Virago Press of Von Arnim’s 1925 quasi-autobiographical novel. This droll and poignant tale of love and age follows Catherine Cumfrit, a widow who is pursued by the much younger Christopher Monckton and marries him, creating confusion and unease among her family and friends. In the book’s introduction by Terence de Vere White, we read that when Elizabeth met again the man who served as the model for Christopher, she found him boring, while he noted her shabby appearance and her enormous hats worn to hide a face “scarred by lifting.” (The author also puts Catherine through some rather harrowing youth restoration treatments at the hands of a quack practitioner.) The novel has its structural problems, not the least of which is how to handle the future of a relationship that seems doomed in spite of the protagonists’ enthusiasm for each other. Von Arnim’s wit, however, is evident throughout the book as in this excerpt in which Christopher begins to find the pressures of marriage a tad exacting:

“Marriage being mainly repetition, and Christopher now being a husband, he presently began to make fewer rapturous speeches. It was quite unconscious, but as the weeks passed it became natural to love with fewer preliminary cooings—to bill, as it were, without remembering first to coo” (337).

 

Le Grand Meaulnes
by Alain-Fournier (Henri-Alban Fournier)

Le Grand Meaulnes (1912) was Alain-Fournier’s only completed novel. He died two years after its publication, killed in action on the Meuse in 1914. The book he left has become a modern classic, especially beloved for its country atmosphere and the fairy tale quest followed by its eponymous hero. The narrator François Seurel, son of a schoolmaster in a small French village, finds his life brightened considerably when the older Augustin Meaulnes joins the household. François’s school friends don’t quite know what to make of the newcomer so they give him a nickname “Le Grand Meaulnes,” one open to interpretation as translator Frank Davison explains in a humorous footnote. The book’s charm, however, lies not in Meaulnes’ love-lorn adventures, but in the evocation of a rural area of north-central France known as the Sologne, its villagers, and their daily lives. The changeable sky, the custom of spring wash day (and the consternation when a guest arrives while the linen is hanging out), a pair of mysterious strolling players, and outings on a summer day form an impressionistic and unsentimental picture of France before the Great War. Here François recounts running out of lemonade and have to drink from an impure spring during a bathing party to the Cher river:

“Our feet on the hot sand and caked mud, we had visions of the bottle of lemonade, which was cooling in a spring at the Grand’ Fons, a spring that bubbled up through the bank of the river. . . . there was only enough of the frothy liquid to make each throat prickle and redouble its thirst. So, one after another, we were driven to the condemned spring, lowering our faces cautiously to the surface of the limpid water. But not all of us were experts in out-of-door etiquette. For some of us, I for one, scarcely succeeded in quenching our thirst: either because of a dislike for water as a beverage, or because the fear of swallowing a wood-louse tightened our throats, or because the transparence of the water made it hard to judge the right distance, with the result that faces plunged in and noses were filled with something so icy it seemed to burn . . . Despite these hazards and drawbacks, it seemed to us, on the hot dry bank of the Cher, that all the coolness in the world was imprisoned in this little pool, and to this day when I hear the word ‘spring’ my mind returns to linger over it” (129).

 

Life
by Keith Richards

Reading this book is like sitting in the curtained library of Keith Richards’ Connecticut home, waving aside the Marlboro smoke and listening to him recount the adventures of being a Rolling Stone. Keef is indefatigable, lucid, and surprisingly easygoing. A handwritten blurb on the back cover announces that “This is the life. Believe it or not, I haven’t forgotten any of it.” He certainly has not, and the gusto and honesty with which he tells about sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll make this 2010 autobiography a standout of the genre. Since its publication, reviewers have mined the book for lurid details from Keith’s destructive relationship with Anita Pallenberg and his durable friendship with the often-unendurable Mick Jagger. But the focus is always the music. Scattered throughout the book are mini-lessons on “guitar weaving,” as he calls it, and frequent, humble expressions of gratitude to those who have shared knowledge of the craft and the love of playing music. No matter how many times he’s played “Jumping Jack Flash,” “Brown Sugar,” “Happy,” or “Satisfaction” (yes, Keith wrote the greatest rock song of all time while he was asleep), he is grinning, not from the drugs, but because it’s just rock n’ rock and he likes it.

 

The Trespasser
by D.H. Lawrence

The Trespasser, Lawrence’s second novel, is one of the author’s lesser known works and one that seems to cause an even more mixed response among scholars—and readers—than usual. If you have a low tolerance for Lawrence’s sensual style and obsessive references to Wagner, you will want to avoid this book. On the other hand, if you are willing to wade through the cringemaking bits, you will be rewarded with a fascinating window into a talent already in full voice, if not necessarily complete command. Siegmund and Helena, our Wagnerian lovers, have slipped away for an illicit holiday on the Isle of Wight. All is not Valhalla, however, because Siegmund is married with four children and his long-suffering wife Beatrice (Lawrence throws in some Dante for variety) knows about the liaison with her husband’s violin student. Helena, a pre-Raphaelite stunner of classically beautiful proportions, is the inhibited woman that Lawrence wrote about so often. Sadly, she refuses to be liberated by love, to unite her body and her soul, and so to achieve Laurentian perfection. For his part, Siegmund is escaping from a squalid domestic situation and a stalled musical career—not quite the artist hero. When they aren’t humming Tristan und Isolde or quoting German poetry, the lovers roam around the island in alternating states of frustration, anxiety, and ecstasy. The end result of their relationship is tragedy, real and banal. Still, the seaside inspires some fine writing as in this passage of Siegmund on the beach:

“Siegmund lay and clasped the sand, and tossed it in handfuls till over him he was all hot and cloyed. The he rose and looked at himself and laughed. The water was swaying reproachfully against the steep pebbles below, murmuring like a child that it was not fair—it was not fair he should abandon his playmate. Siegmund laughed, and began to rub himself free of the clogging sand. He found himself strangely dry ad smooth. He tossed more sand, and more, over himself, busy and intent like a child playing some absorbing game with itself. Soon his body was dry and warm and smooth as a camomile flower. . . .Then he soused himself, and shook his head in the water, and washed and splashed and rubbed himself with his hands assiduously. He must feel perfectly clear and free—fresh, as if he had washed away all the years of soilure in this morning’s sea and sun and sand. It was the purification. Siegmund became again a happy priest of the sun. He felt as if all the dirt of misery were soaked out of him, as he might soak a soiled garment in the sea, and bleach it white on the sunny shore. So white and sweet and tissue-clean he felt—full of lightness and grace” (59).

© 2013 Leann Davis Alspaugh, all rights reserved. Photographs: Stephen Alcorn, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, 1982, relief-block print; Portrait of Alain-Fournier by André Lhote, credit: J.E. Bulloz/Encyclopedia Britannica

OTG Quoted: “The Demand Before All Others”

From Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics

Few authors’ words are more bracing than those of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born on this day in 1906. Bonhoeffer worked on Ethik periodically from 1940 to 1943; the 1949 edition of Ethics represents the edited collection of his fragments. He rigorously defended an eyes-wide-open Christianity that was fully integrated into all the complexities of the modern life. (One of the most intriguing sections in Ethics is Bonhoeffer’s exploration of the Reformation as a catalyst for increasing secularization in western society.) His ecumenical approach called for a church that recognized humanism and emphasized Christology (Christ’s person and work in the world), rather than focusing exclusively on man’s personal salvation (the latter being predicated by Christ’s sacrifice). His writings influenced extensive reform in the Protestant church and extended to political movements such as opposition to apartheid.

All that Bonhoeffer writes must be understood in the context of the moral catastrophe of Nazism. He relentlessly opposed the anti-Semitism of National Socialism from its earliest days. As a leader of the Confessing Church, he worked to resist the Nazis and to rescue Jews from persecution. Much of his political resistance took place while he worked in the German Military Intelligence Department. He was arrested in 1943 and took part in a failed attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944. Bonhoeffer was executed in Flossenbürg, Germany, on April 9, 1945.

 

From page 49 of Ethics (R. Krauss C.C. West, D.W. Stott, trans., Augsburg Fortress, 2005)

The source of a Christian ethic is not the reality of one’s own self, not the reality of the world, nor is it the reality of norms and values. It is the reality of God that is revealed in Jesus Christ. This is the demand, before all others, that must honestly be made of anyone who wishes to be concerned with the problem of a Christian ethic. It places before us the ultimate and decisive question: With what reality will we reckon in our life? With the reality of God’s revelatory word or with the so-called realities of life? With divine grace or with earthly inadequacies? With the resurrection or with death? This question itself, which one can answer by their own choice without answering it falsely, already presupposes a given answer: that God, however we decide, has already spoken the revelatory word and that we, even in our false reality, can live no other way than from the true reality of the word of God. The question about ultimate reality already places us in such an embrace by its answer that there is no way we can escape from it. This answer carries us in the reality of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ from which it comes. 

 

Artwork: Beloved Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Paul Huet, 2010

Happy Birthday, Clyfford Still

American Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still was born on this day in 1904. Still, who died in 1980, was called a myth-maker, a genius, and a maverick by his peers. Jackson Pollock said “he makes the rest of us look academic.” But you wouldn’t be alone if you’ve never heard of Clyfford Still.

Still’s intensely colored wall-sized paintings now have a stunning new home in an eponymous Denver museum designed by Brad Cloefil. The Clyfford Still Museum opened in November 2011 and houses Still’s paintings, sketches, sculptures, and personal artifacts. Still’s work is less well known than that of other Abstract Expressionists because the irascible artist left the art world in the 1950s and sold only about 180 works during his lifetime. (Still or his wife made significant gifts to several American museums such as Buffalo’s Albright-Knox, the San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.) The concentration of Still’s work in Denver—about 94% of the artist’s total output—is all the more rare and remarkable. (Read about my recent visit there in the October 2012 issue of The New Criterion.)

Director Dean Sobel spent some time with me earlier this year and showed me some of the workrooms where research and conservation are taking place. One whole room was dedicated to the boxes and portfolios that Still and his family collected. Opening one of these portfolios, he showed me stacks of sketches, including Still’s first attempts at making art. Next door, two young conservators were examining some early paintings, including a surprisingly candid self-portrait of the artist laughing. Another room held massive rolls of painted canvases waiting to be stretched. Sobel said that sometimes they encounter paint that is still damp on these unstretched works.

The second floor houses Still’s early figurative works and the transitional paintings. The fully-realized Abstract Expressionist works are installed in airy rooms filled with light filtered through hundreds of oval oculae in the museum’s roof. The walls are scored concrete of a light gray that coexists happily with the massive paintings.

On view through January 20, 2013, is Vincent/Clyfford an exhibition that explores the connections between the Dutch master and the American painter. (Actually, once you see Still’s early figurative works with their harvest scenes and mannered figures, the influence is not so unexpected.)

Photographs: Clyfford Still, 1951, Hans Namuth. Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; PH-247, 1951, Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, photograph by Ben Blackwell

 

 

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Girl of a Hundred Lists

Recently read...with capsule reviews!

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (reread)

What makes this 1925 novel by American naturalist Theodore Dreiser so compelling? Clyde Griffiths is a sentimental youth of indifferent education whose good looks and facile charm allow him to break into small town society with all its breathless prospects. Dreiser's prose may be workmanlike, but the story along moves like a steam locomotive, lumbering and purposeful, toward its tragic ending. Here, Dreiser sums of the social forces of Clyde’s predicament: “The truth was that in this crisis he was as interesting an illustration of the enormous handicaps imposed by ignorance, youth, poverty, and fear as one could have found.”

 

The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham (reread)

Based on events in the life of Gauguin, this droll tale reimagines the French painter as an uncouth Englishman who leaves his bourgeois life as a stockbroker to pursue art in Paris and later Tahiti. Maugham uses various devices to lend his tale authenticity such as footnotes and references to “famous biographers” of the artist Charles Strickland. But nothing is more real than his portrait of the artist as a brutally self-centered and heartless man. Having stolen another painter’s wife and left her to die after a suicide attempt, Strickland can’t even pretend to care about anything other than his art:

“Strickland found his hat, and stood looking at me. [The artist has invited the narrator to see his paintings for the first time.]
‘Are you coming?’
‘Why do you seek my acquaintance?’ I asked him. ‘You know that I hate and despise you.’
He chuckled good-humouredly.
‘Your only quarrel with me really is that I don’t care a twopenny damn what you think about me.’”

 

Darkness Visible by William Golding (reread)

Golding’s 1979 novel is billed as a parable of good and evil and that’s as good a summary as any for this surreal tale of social misfits in 1970s London. We meet Matty during the Blitz when he appears out of a fire, a hideously burned orphan. He might be a prophet or simply slow. Sophy and her twin Tony are the neglected daughters of a chess maniac. These three cross paths in an ill-conceived kidnapping attempt. Along the way, we meet a cast of indelible characters, among them, the pedophile schoolmaster Mr. Pedigree. If Dickens had ever penned such a degenerate, he might have written something similar to this by Golding:

“Quivering with distaste, Mr. Pedigree looked round the room. It was his custom and entertainment to arrange the boys in order of beauty so that the most beautiful occupied the front row. There was no doubt at all in his mind as to where the new boy [the disfigured Matty] should go. At the back of the room on his right, a tall cupboard left enough space for a desk that would be partly concealed by it. The cupboard could not be shifted flush against the wall without blocking a window.
    ‘Brown, you exquisite creature, I shall want you out of there. You can sit in Barlow’s place. Yes, I know he’ll be back; and then we shall have to do some more arranging, shan’t we? Anyway Brown, you’re an imp, there when you think I can’t see you. Stop laughing, you men. I won’t have you laughing. Now then, what’s your name? Wandgrave. Can you keep order, mm? Go and sit in that corner and just keep quiet and tell me if they don’t behave, mm? Go along!’”

 

A Place to Come to by Robert Penn Warren (reread)

Jedediah Tewksbury just wants a place to come to, but first he has to get away from Claxford County, Alabama. Warren’s opening is surely one of the funniest in literature:

“I was the only boy, or girl either, in the public school of the town of Dugford, Claxford County, Alabama, whose father ever got killed in the middle of the night standing up in the front of his wagon to piss on the hindquarters of one of a span of mules and, being drunk, pitching forward on his head, still hanging on to his dong, and hitting the pike in such a position and condition that both the left front and right rear wheels of the wagon rolled, with perfect precision, over his unconscious neck, his having passed out being, no doubt, the reason he took the fatal plunge in the first place. Throughout, he was still holding on to his dong.”

 

Ask Me Tomorrow by James Gould Cozzens

See my OTG post from October 13 for more on this fine novel by the woefully unappreciated Cozzens.

OTG Quoted: Ask Me Tomorrow by James Gould Cozzens

Cozzens’ biographer Matthew Bruccoli characterizes Ask Me Tomorrow (1940) as a “study in the defensive pride of a talented young man in reduced circumstances.” This talented young man (a thinly-veiled alter ego), Francis Ellery, is a dazzlingly flawed creation, a writer equipped with a literary allusion for every occasion—even in Latin if required—and yet at home on the ski slopes, the tennis courts, and the hockey rinks of Europe. But he wouldn’t be partaking of any of this if he weren’t employed as the tutor of the son of the wealthy American family on a European tour.

(And why are men manly tutors while women are mousy governesses?)

It is while dining at a resort in Montreux with his employer Mrs. Cunningham, her daughter Helen, and son Walter that Francis has the inner monologue quoted below. Out loud, he is discoursing on Scheidemann and German politics, while his digressive and far-reaching mind has ranged further east to consider another exiled socialist.

“Where, for instance, was Trotzky tonight? Francis tried to think of him, too; of the tailor’s body like a dwarf in its Cossack’s greatcoat, of the hope and fear, the love and hate, behind the screwed-up Jewish comedian’s face, brooding (in ever deadlier personal peril as, his great services forgotten, enemies in his party worked to pull him down) on the havocs and ecstasies of the Soviet apocalypse—the Byzantine treachery, the torture chambers, the spies in the wall, the concealed revolvers, the monster parades, the waving red flags, the broken furniture and the frozen plumbing. Like scenes from Gulliver’s Travels, all day and all night a double column serried past the mummy of Lenin; and in the factories the moron mechanics sang as they ruined new machines; and in the fields the peasants like Nebuchadnezzar ate grass; and in crowded halls a thousands commissars shouted speeches; and in a thousand frowzy committee rooms the illiterate architects of the future scratched for lice and made mistakes in arithmetic as they tinkered with their millennium. Meanwhile the wine was poured for Mrs. Cunningham and Helen and Francis, and a half a glass for Walter; and down the long bright room came Miss Poulter in her electric blue gown” (Harcourt Brace, pages 149–150).

Girl of a Hundred Lists

Recently Read

Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag by Orlando Figes

The Duel by Joseph Conrad

The Deptford Trilogy—Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders by Robertson Davies (second reading)

S.S. San Pedro by James Gould Cozzens

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki

Location, Location, Location

It was bad enough when the trustees of the Barnes Foundation disregarded the wishes of Albert Coombs Barnes (1872–1951) and moved his remarkable art collection from its original home in Merion, Pennsylvania, to the new Barnes Foundation museum in Philadelphia. The critics’ appreciative notices of the relocated collection, which opened in May of this year, quieted much of the criticism surrounding the move, but it is impossible not to regret the loss of a setting conceived of by Barnes as a singular experience that combined art and education.

Barnes, a doctor and chemist, made a fortune in the antiseptic drug Argyrol. He began to collect European modernists—Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne—and met Gertrude and Leo Stein in Paris who introduced him to more art and artists as yet unappreciated in the United States. He had strong ideas about not only how to view this art, but also who should view it. His was not a discriminatory or snobbish perspective, but rather one devoted to connoisseurship in the best sense of the word. He stockpiled his treasures to admire them and to help others learn how to look and think about the marvels on display.

A serious man who wrote books about theories and aesthetic imperatives, Barnes aimed with his collection to offer an “aesthetic education [in which the student learns] to see as the artist sees.” Idealistic certainly, but he was almost virtually alone in seeing the value of artists who wouldn’t even be remotely recognized by a handful of Americans until the 1913 Armory Show. (Imagine the reaction of the establishment to the Toulouse-Lautrec painting at the above.) Those fortunate enough to be granted access by Barnes to view his art had to appreciate the privilege; anyone caught ridiculing any piece was summarily ejected from the premises. When he died in a car accident in 1951, Barnes’s will expressly stated that no object was ever to be loaned or deaccessioned from the building he erected in 1922. So strongly did Barnes conceive of objects in relation to each other that he also specified that no single piece was ever to be moved from the spot in which he placed it.

Actually, Barnes’s untimely death left the opening for which many of his detractors had been waiting. The doctor had long refused the blandishments of those twin forces in the museum world, academics and socialites. Nor was he interested in large-scale cultural inculcation of the public school variety. Among his many enemies was Walter Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Annenberg, himself an esteemed art collector, had long antagonized Barnes with lawsuits challenging the Foundation’s bylaws—namely, Barnes’s wish to keep the collection private.

With Barnes dead, control of the foundation went to trusted disciple Violette de Mazia, Barnes’s widow, and Lincoln University. This group was no match for Annenberg who finally succeeded in forcing the institution to open to the public in 1961. At last, the treasure trove was accessible to anyone and everyone, but where were the tours, the catalogues, the labels, the coat check?

Mazia’s death in 1988 and subsequent actions by Lincoln University attorney Richard H. Glanton changed, in the words of Lance Esplund in the Weekly Standard, “an educational institution into a marketable commodity.” In 2002, the Barnes Foundation board announced that it could no longer make ends meet due to zoning restrictions that limited hours and traffic. Annenberg through his Annenberg Foundation along with several other entities spearheaded the relocation of the Barnes collection, conservatively valued today at $20–$30 billion.

The Wright Stuff

Now comes news that the archives at Taliesin West are to be moved east, having been acquired jointly by The Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University. Reporting in the Wall Street Journal, Eric Felten notes that Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) was “adamant” that the materials related to Taliesin West remain in the desert environment that inspired them. Why are these archives that document the last decades of America's most significant architect to be relocated? Because, as Felten points out, they should reside in New York City since it is a truth universally acknowledged that the Big Apple is America’s cultural capital.

Wright broke ground on Taliesin West, a Usonian house, in 1937 and worked on it until his death. Conceived as a winter camp, the house became a home, a studio, and an architectural laboratory; today, the Taliesin West Foundation mentors fortunate young architects. Wright’s ashes are buried here along with those of his wife Olgivanna.

Built on 600 acres in the Sonoran desert outside Scottsdale, Arizona, Taliesin West gave Wright one of his largest canvases. Wright envisioned the house’s experimental combination of redwood, masonry, steel, and fiberglass as a matrix from which the building would “grow” and take on the desert’s textures and colors. Inside the main house, Wright’s penchant for the triangle is executed in the furniture he designed for the house as well as in design motifs throughout the compound.

When I visited Taliesin West about three years ago, I began to understand how difficult it must be to maintain a Wright structure, especially one with vast surface areas exposed to the harsh desert elements. What makes the house so magnificent—its setting and exposed elements—is also its downfall. In the dramatic living room, the waterspotted redwood beams and the hazy skylights attested to the ravages of weather and strong sunlight. One can only imagine how the caretakers labor to stay one step ahead of disaster.

And then there’s the dust. Like floodwaters, dust finds a way in every crack and crevice and with 22 years of archives to protect—hundreds of thousands of photographs, drawings, documents—it is undoubtedly a relentless, tedious, and expensive job. Writing in the Journal, Felten quotes Taliesin West Foundation CEO Sean Malone as citing the need for “dust-free infrastructure” in order to care properly for Wright’s papers. Odd then, Felten wryly observes, that the Foundation should place green energy before archival priorities by finding a way to raise a million dollars for a solar power energy system. Arizona’s State Historic Preservation Officer wasn’t much help either, opting for sending the collection anywhere that it could be preserved. “Frank Lloyd Wright famously derided New York as the most provincial place in the U.S.,” writes Felten. “It’s too bad the Wright Foundation ultimately bought into the narrow provincialism that fancies the Apple as the essential repository of American art.”

Where Is Great Art to Be Found?

I would never deny that in terms of quality, quantity, and diversity, New York City offers enough art to fill a lifetime. But regional museums are always remarkable as I’ve discovered again and again. The short answer to where great art can be found is in your own backyard.

Here’s just a very short and incomplete list of small museums I’ve enjoyed visiting in no particular order:

San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas
Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, Texas
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA
Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN
Freylinghuysen Morris House, Lenox, MA 
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA 
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA 
Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem, MA 
Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute, Utica, NY 
Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY 
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME 
Brandywine River Art Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

© 2012 Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.

Photography: Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, A Montrouge (Rosa la Rouge), 1886-87, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; Taliesin West (1937–1959), Frank Lloyd Wright, Scottsdale, Arizona

Portrait of a Friend

Portrait of Elizabeth Bowen at Bowenscourt by Patrick Hennessy

Most of the images of Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) are photographs with her trademark cigarette and tailored suits, often surrounded by a coterie of friends and acquaintances. Painted in 1957, this portrait by Irish artist Patrick Hennessy (1915–1980) offers the fresh perspective of a friend.

Hennessy captures the author on the landing at her beloved Bowen's Court, the family home for more than three centuries in County Cork, Ireland. Bowen, author of many short stories and novels such as The Last September (1929), The Death of the Heart (1938), and The Heat of the Day (1949), gathers her skirt in her left hand. Has she just ascended the stairs and turned away from the window or is she on her way down? The slanting sunlight seems to indicate a late summer evening. Maybe Bowen is composing her face to greet her dinner guests. An avid entertainer, Bowen must have stood in this same spot many times before joining her guests for luncheon, tea, cocktails, or parties.

Here, however, Bowen is pensive and introspective. Hennessy’s limpid light glances off of her masculine face. It is a face that is handsome rather than pretty with broad cheekbones and intelligent eyes. The composition is remarkable for its strong diagonals and sense of momentary stillness. In a work by a German romantic, the tinted clouds and leafy tree through the window might have invited poetic meanderings about nature and fate. But the world Hennessy depicts is more rigorous than that. A palette of classical restraint and rich but narrowly focused tonalities mirror Bowen's own propensities for complex but controlled narratives. The Georgian features of the landing window and staircase railing serve as a microcosm of craftsmanship and good taste—also hallmarks of Bowen’s writing.

Bowen is famously quoted as saying that her work examines “life with the lid on and what happens when the lid comes off.” Indeed, much of the tension in her work comes from the balance that the characters struggle to maintain between appearances and volatile human emotions. Perhaps the juggling of discretion and passion was second nature for Bowen who conducted a discreet 32-year affair with a Canadian diplomat—an affair accepted by her husband and everyone who knew them.

The strength of her fiction lies as much in her distillation of her characters’ relationships as it does in evoking the world around them. The Death of the Heart, for example, tracks the slow erosion of idealism of the young Portia as her girlish character contracts more and more under the clumsy manipulations of her guardians and the boorish behavior of her acquaintances. Around this deeply sad tale, Bowen weaves a setting that makes urban London gardens and shabby seaside cottages glow with light and life. There's even a touch of brilliant comedy in the characterization of Daphne, the daughter of a governess with whom Portia stays at the seaside. Bowen shares with Henry James a gift for close observance, but is not burdened with trying to convey that complexity by means of dense, convoluted prose.

Hennessy’s portrait was last seen in the United States in 2010 at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art during its exhibition Literary Lives: Portraits from the Crawford Art Gallery and Abbey Theatre. This fine portrait of an exceptional—and somewhat under-appreciated—author shows how well Hennessy understood his friend's character, her heritage, and the significance of a sense of place in her life and work. 

Photographs: Portrait of Elizabeth Bowen at Bowenscourt by Patrick Hennessy, © Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland; Elizabeth Bowen as seen on cover of Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives, edited by Susan Osborn, 2009 

© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.