Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 A really enjoyable read. I especially appreciate the weaving of the writings of Moroccans into the fascinating story of Matisse in the country, so we get to see not only Matisse's view of the country, but also the country's view, so to speak, of Matisse. The autonomy, dignity, respect, and equality that Matisse gave to his Moroccan human subjects, such as Zorah and the Riffian, is beautifully drawn out from his diaries, interviews, and, most importantly, paintings. I've always loved the mysterious painting "The Moroccans" in MoMA, and this biography makes beautifully clear the history of Matisse's engagement with Islamic art and North Africa that led up to its climactic finish in the painting. Morocco gave Matisse his resoundingly original answer to Cubism. 

The Body Camera   “You cannot bring the body camera with you to the grave,” says the kitchen inspector. He dips his finger into the batter and tastes it. It is grainy. We are, after all, in the quarterfinals of the Great British Baking Show, where the judgment will be more severe than ever. For the technical challenge, Paul and Mary would like you to bake an anti-terrorism sword. It is a Chinese app and everyone will be required to download it onto their phone. You have two-and-a-half hours. You may remove the gingham covering now. The camera is rolling. The anus remembers.   The Scout Leader   The search in my underwear is unwarranted. I have not had a nocturnal emission since I was fifteen, dreaming that my scout leader was pulling off his shirt and advancing on my vibrating form. Before he could touch me, I was all wet and warm below. But now, whenever I write about the dream, and I am always writing about the dream even when I am not, the beautiful scout leader wears ...

Saw the show "Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today" at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. Curated by Denise Murrell as her PhD thesis, the show argued that Manet broke from the Orientalist and ethnographic depiction of black women current during his time, that Matisse took his cue from Manet in his painting of his black models, and that subsequent painters have been in part influenced or reacted against these two forerunners, in particular, Manet's famous "Olympia." I was particularly happy to see Matisse's "Dame a la robe blanche" (1946) in which negative space defines the woman's chest, and for a second time his cutout "Creole Dancer," now rendered visibly black due to this show. I was also taken with Charles Alston's "Girl in a Red Dress" (1934), showing a modern and sophisticated young Harlemite.

Happening upon Matisse's Jazz cutouts at Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington green shoots the old magician on a sax Happening on Jazz was but one of the many happy incidents in Bloomington. The annual ALSCW conference ended last night with a banquet in the beautiful Tudor Room in Indiana Memorial Union, where the conference took place. The eating was followed by readings from the association's journal Literary Imagination . Jim McGregor paid a lovely tribute to his wife Sallie Spence, the founding editor of the journal, by reading a poem by Mark Strand published in the very first issue. Sallie read a poem by the Meringoff prize winner George Kologeris, a poem about his father blessing the house with a spring of basil. Archie Burnett, the current editor, read a non-fictional piece on the commas in the famous first sentence of Austen's Pride and Prejudice , and the same punctuation mark in Milton's Paradise Lost . John Burt regaled our table with Civil Wa...

The train ride from Paris to Nice took more than the promised four-and-a-half hours. The country views were brilliant--open blue skies, ochre rolling fields--and seeing the Mediterranean for the first time as the train hugged the coastline was very special, but next time we will take a plane instead. We left the crowded train station, picked up our apartment keys from a hotel nearby, and walked through the city, rolling our bags behind us. We were struck by how Italian the city looked. The first settlement was founded by the Greeks of Marseilles around 360 BCE. It came under the dominion of Savoy, then France, then Piedmont-Sardinia, and then back to France in 1860. After we had settled into the apartment on Rue de Suede, we took a walk along the famous Bay of Angels, by the Mediterranean. Nice, Bay of Angels The next day, the plan was to hit Coco Beach, some way out of the city, but we found an outdoors market when we walked about Vieille Ville, or Old Town. The Sunday market ...

Last weekend, in DC, I saw Ai Weiwei's show at the Hirshhorn Museum. His work attempts to marry sleek formalism with political protest. The two aims clash, in my view, neither arising organically from the other. Is a huge serpent made ingeniously out of knapsacks really the most emotionally convincing way to protest the deaths of children in a Sichuan earthquake when their school collapsed due to poor construction and regulation? Ai has obviously learned a great deal from American minimalism during his stay in New York City in the 1980's. The application of these lessons to Chinese issues seems to have been unproblematic in his practice, and that is the problem of his art for me. His art is made for Western consumption. In two big photographs, he shows his middle finger to both the White House and Tiannanmen Square, but only in the latter is the image of the Great Helmsman poked in the eye. There is nobody in the White House photo. Nam June Paik, "Zen for TV" 19...

I have not seen the show yet, but bought the beautifully produced catalogue at the Met. All the essays examine the show's focus: Matisse's work in pairs, trios or series. Landscapes, still life, interiors, nudes--these genres at the heart of Matisse's painting--saw intense experimentation in the re-working of an original. What is striking about Matisse's pairs is that they were very often painted in the same format and size. These were very controlled experiments. More radically, they were also shown by Matisse as finished paintings in their own right. The sketch was traditionally hidden from sight but not Matisse's. Later in his career, he showed, together with the painting, the photographs that documented the progress of the painting. He was responding to the charge of easy conservatism. He insisted that he was a painstaking artist who was constantly pushing the boundaries of his art. Of Interior in Yellow and Blue (1946) and Interior in Venetian Red (1946...

The last three weekends were busy ones. S and R drove up from D.C. to stay with us overnight on September 29. We went up to the roof of the Met and enjoyed the glittering autumnal view there. Then we had a very nice dinner at le Paris , which I strongly recommend. Columbus Day weekend began on Friday with drinks with DW. We hadn't seen each other for a long time, and the time at Suite Bar passed very pleasantly, so pleasantly that we both wondered afterwards why we were not meeting more often. Then on Saturday, dinner with P and J at Spring Natural Kitchen on the UWS because J wanted to try its organic cooking. Dinner was a success. It was so easy to be with them, so relaxing.  On Sunday G and I went to Philly for the day. We both loved the new Barnes Foundation building, designed by Tod Williams. I was mesmerized by the Matisse dance mural but liked "The Joy of Life" much less than I thought I would. I had the unwanted feeling that the Picasso works in the coll...

The Steins Collect at the SFMoMA is a big show. it reunites the collections of Gertrude, Leo, and Michael and Sarah Stein, dispersed after their deaths. Gertrude and Leo collected both Matisse and Picasso, among other artists, until they quarreled over Picasso's turn to Cubism. Leo rejected Picasso and became contented with looking at Matisse's new work in exhibition. Gertrude continued to champion Picasso, but not Matisse, for she saw an analogue in the Spanish master's experiments in forms to her own avant-gardism in writing. Michael and Sarah remained faithful to Matisse, who loved their son Allan and painted him many times. Portraits of Michael and Sarah by Matisse were hung in pride of place in their house. There were so many Matisse works in the show that it was impossible to do them justice on one visit. I was enchanted by joyous colors of The Girl with Green Eyes, as well as a small delicate drawing of Madame Matisse in the olive grove. The Conversation, a paintin...

Last Wednesday LW and I saw at the Jewish Museum the special exhibition, "Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore." Miss Etta and Dr. Claribel, as their friends called them, were introduced by their fellow Jewish Baltimoreans Leo and Gertrude Stein to Matisse in Paris. Like the Steins, they were avid collectors, financed first by their father's wholesale grocery business, and then by their brothers' hugely successful textile enterprise. Trained as a gynaecologist, Claribel became the Professor of Pathology at Baltimore Women's Medical College, and taught in both America and Europe. LW remarked on the near-invisibility of such accomplished women in the history of the USA held in most people's heads. Etta, six years younger, ran her father's household. She had a strong romantic attachment to Gertrude Stein. Both sisters remained unmarried to the end of their lives. I enjoyed the exhibition mostly for the Matisse paintings and s...

TLS January 12 2011 from Julian Bell's review of Deanna Petherbridge's The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and theories of practice : ... Klee's notion of "taking a line for a walk", or Matisse's "desire of the line"... *** from John Ray's review of British Museum exhibit "Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead": O my heart of my mother, my heart of my forms, do not stand against me as a witness, do not oppose me in the tribunal, do not incline against me in the presence of the Keeper of the scales, for you are my spirit which is in my body, the god with the potter's wheel who moulded and made safe my limbs. Go on to the happy places to which we speed. In ancient Egypt, these were the words that were needed during the judgement of the dead. The subject's heart is being weighed in a balance, in the presence of the most awesome of the gods. In the opposite pan of the scales is the feather of truth, and the heart of the righteo...

The Chinatown bus took only four hours to pull into South Station. It was easy getting to Hotel 140, on Clarendon Street, by subway. When SK arrived, from Montreal, we walked a couple of blocks to Copley Square. We ate a simple lunch and dipped our legs into the fountain. SK is a now a proud homeowner, with his partner, in Paris. We both liked the Boston Public Library's McKim Building very much. Built at the end of the nineteenth century. it was a library in a palace. The entrance hall had a vaulted ceiling, on which were lettered the names of thirty famous Bostonians. A deep triumphal arch connected the entrance hall to the main staircase. The steps were made of ivory gray Echaillon marble, mottled with fossil shells. The walls were a warm yellow Siena. From the landing, through a big window, the courtyard and pool could be taken in. In the Sargent gallery, the American painter decorated its walls with the mural sequence Triumph of Religion . Many of the murals featured beaut...

He returned from Morocco in 1913, and before departing from Paris to Nice in 1917, painted some of his most challenging works. In the geometric construction of the paintings, you can see his response to Cubism, and in his use of blacks and grays his response to World War I. Instead of focusing on the aesthetic or political context of this body of work, the MoMA show throws a light on its physical production, how Matisse scratched and etched and repainted the canvases, or else left them "unfinished." The result is an exciting glimpse into Matisse at work in his studio. Why the physical effort, and then to leave the evidence so clearly on the paintings? Matisse wanted to fight in the war but was rejected because of his influenza. poor eyesight and age. He spoke (or wrote?) about fighting the war in his own way, on his canvases, and so he did, I believe. But who was he fighting against? Not the Tradition, which he loved, but Himself. He fought to paint a different way from how...

30. Things that Quicken the Pulse xxx Hurricane warning. Running the hand through a man’s thick hair. Merino wool cardigan. A wave of flamingoes taking to the air. Coming on Matisse’s Red Studio . The thought of an approaching quarrel. The restaurant door opens, and lets in a draught. *

I saw again last night the huge Bacon retrospective at the Met. I had been dreading a second look because I had read some less than worshipful reviews in the meantime, and I wondered how they would affect another encounter with the works. I am glad to report that my worship has cooled down, not to disappointment, but to a strong admiration for the painter. It has become reasonable. It is not easy to be reasonable with Bacon, because his paintings elicit--strive to elicit, in fact--visceral reactions. That contorted, broken body on the divan: if you don't submerge your eyes in its pain, you will only see the ridiculous melodrama--the faulty epistemology--of paint imitating blood and semen. It's no longer a surprise to see modern works splattered with blood and semen--and shit--but Bacon is more painterly than that. The effect must be achieved through paint. That intransigency is a strength. No collages for him, no "real-world" objects. He relies on photographs but uses...

Many interesting items at the exhibition, " New at the Morgan: Acquisitions since 2004 ." An Irving Penn photograph of T. S. Eliot has the poet seated, cross-legged, and hiding his hands behind him. Another Penn photograph has Norman Mailer sprawled on a chair, crotch defying the viewer. A Diane Arbus photo of Auden and Marianne Moore, arm-in-arm, taken at an Auden reading. A letter from Eliot to a college pal when both were in their late twenties, and Eliot was already famous includes a jokey poem about buggery at the altar. A letter from Robert Frost to Conrad Aiken about a tennis date, which reminded me his stricture against writing without meter. A letter from Henry James to Zola supporting the latter's public protest in the Dreyfus affair. An early draft of "In the White Giant's Thigh" by Dylan Thomas: his handwriting is, surprisingly, small and neat. A still life drawing, with chocolaterie, by Matisse showing the impact of van Gogh's draughtsmanshi...

Having an unexpected hour to spare, before the Chin Music reading, I walked over to the Met, and wandered into the exhibition "Cast in Bronze: French Sculpture from Renaissance to Revolution." My instinct is to prefer marble to bronze as sculptural material. Marble is as pure as bronze is fussy. Stone, to my mind, is more organic than tin. Marble is to sculptor as metal is to engineer. Bronze, an alloy of tin and copper, was expensive during the period under consideration, and so brass was a frequent substitute. Many of the works were made using the "lose-wax" method. Different patinations were used, but a rich dark patina came to be preferred later in the French tradition.  I like very much a bronze statuette of Hermes by Barthelemy Prieur (Berzieux, ca. 1536-Paris, 1611). The head, body and arms are tilted in opposing yet harmonious directions, as the god plays his missing flute. The French excelled in dramatic set pieces and seemed particularly enthralled by rape...

The exhibition tries to put the case for Bonnard as a modernist master, and not a mere Post-Impressionist working past the due date of the movement. Restricting the show to his late interiors, however, does not help to make the case. The color experiments look interesting, but not innovative; his pictorial language changed little in these paintings from 1927 to the end of his life in 1947.  He painted the dining room, the breakfast room, the upstairs bedroom in his house at La Cannet, and the objects in them like a raffia basket of fruits, a vase of flowers, bottles of wine. The one still life that really held my attention was that of a bowl of cherries. And "The Breakfast Room" is noble. But I remember being bowled over by his paintings of the terrace and garden seen elsewhere. At this show I was underwhelmed.  I don't understand why one critic called Bonnard "the most abstract of painters." These late interiors seem to me insufficiently abstract. They are conc...

I'm reading this afternoon at the Bowery Poetry Club for the 15th Annual Alternative New Year's Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza, called EX TENEBRIS RISING. Alternative to what, I hear you ask. No one has told me, but my guess is alternative to the new year's reading at St. Mark's Poetry Project. Both Bowery and St. Mark's are great New York institutions, if the former has a reputation for grungier experimentation. I have read in both places, St. Mark's more recently, and I am looking forward to reading on the huge stage at the Bowery again. Given three minutes, like all readers, I will probably read three sonnets from Payday Loans , to see if I could sell a few more copies of the book. The last days of 2008 were spent proofreading the galley for my new book, Equal to the Earth (Poets Wear Prada Press, March 2009). Roxanne, my publisher, has been marvelously patient as we went back and forth via emails over the smallest detail. That collaboration would ...

Built around a squarish stairwell, the interior of the museum presented to the eye a series of cuboid faces, which resolved, as one climbed up the stairs, round and round, into circular shapes at the very top, a metal bridge spanning the stairwell, leading to the final galleries. Martin Puryear's craft-like sculptures were on display at the top, and having seen them in New York MoMA I enjoyed making my acquaintance with them again, especially the "Circle" series.  Just below the top floor, a whole level was dedicated to participation art, which I am not interested in, and so did not visit. Another level for photography showcased images of microscopic specimens and telescopic sights. Walking through that space I felt I was looking at natural history, instead of art. The SFMoMA seemed to suffer from a multiple personality disorder. On the second level were the paintings and sculptures from the permanent collection. The exhibition space was not large, and so most painters we...