Before history was written, when people didn't know how grow food or build shelters, they painted. Cave dwellers covered their rock-lined rooms with the days of their lives. You might say that graffiti artists carry on the Paleolithic tradition.
While teaching art in a New York high school some years ago, I had a student given to marking up subway cars. But he was no "Kilroy Was Here" disciple of America’s pop culture efforts of the ‘40s and ‘50s.
An aerosol paint can in his hand was like a chisel in Michelangelo's. I'm not kidding. This kid could make a trail of subway of cars sing like a chorus in a Broadway musical, down to the applause he prompted from strap-hangers.
This was before graffiti rose up from the street to exhibit halls. This boy’s underground picture-making seemed less an act of vandalism and more a demonstration of urban folk art. And even though the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a retrospective of the most infamous graffiti artist in subway lore, Keith Haring, a court sentenced him to cleaning the subway cars he had ``marred.''
Clearly, the subway artist in my classroom was on the right track. Haring's subway art, down to its homoerotic hardcore porn, is deemed public art now.
The Whitney exhibit traced Haring's development from his chalk and felt-tip pen days to his ornate field painting. I'm partial to his outlaw variety, the jostling figures art and their chaotic, cartoon-y quality. They reminded me of my student’s subway art, minus the homoeroticism.
Primitive to the core, Haring's subway work was a kind of latter-day cave art. His exhibit at the Whitney was just the beginning of connoisseurship for graffiti. Claudia Barbieri, writing for the New York Times out of Paris, has chronicled the bounty of graffiti exhibits on both sides of the Atlanti, complete with adoring exhibit goers. “People have been lining up round the block to get in,” she said.
Shades of the strap hangers in the ‘70s who swooned over a boy’s subway car art.
Daily lines around the Grand Palais, a leading picture palace, reportedly stretched further than those for the Warhol exhibition next door. The attraction? A collectionof graffit paintings from street artists ranging from New York’s subway art of the ‘70s to contemporary urban art in Europe and South America.
My student’s work didn’t show up in this collection, but that of other New Yorkers like him did, including examples by a former delivery boy and son of a well-known banking family credited for bringing the New York style of graffit to France in the ‘80.
How respectable has graffiti art become? The Grand Palais puts on display work by Nunca, the Brazilian street-artist famed for being invited to spray paint murals on the river facade of the Tate Modern, in London.
And in Manhattan, a couple of galleries – the Helenbeck and Gismondi – debuted a graffiti show along with 17th- and 18th-century furnishings.
Pre-opening jitters centered on the worry that gallery goers in New York may not take to graffiti in galleries. But the stuff of subway scrawlers wowed the crowd. Barbieri said that opening night drew hundreds that lined up around the block – in the rain, no less.
Wait, there’s more: a show at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris with a retrospective of urban street art. To hear Barbieri tell it, you can’t get more of a “sacramental consecration” than a graffiti show at the Cartier foundation.
Transitioning from marking up walls to doing it on canvas has changed the tools from your basic aerosol cans to something quite elaborate: spray cans that can produce thick and thin line and blend-able colors that mimic painting with a brush.
If you ask me, such sophisticated tools are coloring the new graffiti inauthentic. Why go to the trouble of spray-painting an image that looks as if it were? Isn't that like a photo-real painting trying to look like a color slide? Why should something look like something else when the real thing is do-able?
Mind you, all artists should be able to make art out of anything they want and that ought to include blendable spray paints. But to make art out of a spray can that looks like art made with a brush is making art under false colors, not to mention pointless.
The digital photography of Florida artist Nancy Hellebrand – look-a-likes for painting - raises questions that go unasked in a digital art exhibit. The following exchange between Hellebrand and me may hold some answers.
ALTABE: You go to the trouble of electronically generating an image that looks as if it were painted by hand. Why? I grant you that artists have always taken lifeless matter, like clay, and transformed it into living form, and it may be said that circuitry is another form of clay. I also acknowledge that electronic technologies gets art out of its traditional spaces. It can likewise be argued that it doesn't matter if art comes in cyber form, as long as it's good art.
But I don’t kid myself. I like the way your pictures look because of their beguiling resemblance to painting. When I remember that the images are not painted, but push-buttoned, the light of the cathode ray comes on in my head and in a click, I become un-beguiled.
HELLEBRAND: I actually didn’t choose to work with a computer, but technology made darkroom work and conventional photographic printing obsolete. Hours and hours in the darkroom (with no sunlight and intense noxious smells) made no sense when it became possible to accomplish the same thing in a minute fraction of the time on the computer.
I feel that the means an artist uses are of no great significance. It's what the finished product is that matters.
ALTABE: OK. Take us through your thinking about your exhibit example it and what you think matters about it.
HELLEBRAND: It is a picture of familiar trees and shrubs of our region. These trees and shrubs are very beautiful without my intervention. However, I'm a photographer and this is grist for my mill. I liked the single photographs that were combined for this image, but they didn't really get my juices flowing. When I combined the files and worked with them in Photoshop it became a new thing - different, not what we know. To me the final picture has an interest apart from what I see and know from my daily life here.
Myy artistic struggle is to invoke the infinite in the finite. It is the unseen aspect of my subject matter which I am constantly trying to discover. By "unseen" I mean something beyond vision and speech, something which cannot really be articulated in pictures or words, but which is even more essential than that which is describable.
ALTABE: You talk of a desire to photograph the underside of what you see, Isn’t that what art is about? Thomas Messer said it in a Guggenheim exhibit note about modern painting more than 40 years ago. He said that art of the time was not necessarily concerned with the re presentation of visible things, but often reflected that part of existence that lies behind and beneath observable appearances.
Given that you've taught art history and must surely know of the driving force behind modernism, why do you consider your wanting to photograph the unseen a discovery?
HELLEBRAND: What I am doing may not seem so unique, but because it is me who makes the photograph and because it is happening at this time in history, in this place, there is the possibility of something new, hopefully an Ah Ha!! experience. To elegantly and juicily capture a subject in a photograph is thrilling to me, but less thrilling than taking that as my starting point and then making it more revealing, way beyond subject matter.
My pictures happen to reflect concerns one usually associates more with painting than photography. All the same to me - it matters not. I'd say the proof is in the work. Good work coming from a computer or camera makes it because it speaks to us. You can't argue truth and beauty!
ALTABE: Arguing that would be like sparring with Keats’s view that truth and beauty are all we need to know.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Warhol
Andy Warhol’s paintings of Brillo boxes might have made art popular, but they have nothing to do with art. He had a different goal. He made this clear when asked, "What you do want?'' Patrick Smith, author of "Warhol: Conversations About the Artist,'' did the asking: "You've got everything: You have crowds, hordes, young people, beautiful people, charming people, rich people, lovely people. Nobody seems to touch you. What do you want?'' Warhol answered, “I want more fame.''
And he acted out that wanting. He used to sit in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan dolled up in wild white wigs, sunglasses and a James Dean leasther jacket, hoping to be noticed.
Also helping him get noticed were the celebrity portraits he painted, like Marilyn Monroe's after she died and Jackie Kennedy Onassis' after she was widowed. Following the deaths of Monroe and President Kennedy, Warhol began his "Disaster Series,'' such as the "Electric Chair.'' After he was shot by one of his groupies, his work grew still darker with images of skull, gun and knife.
You might think that such imagery reflects on the violence in America society, but not if you take seriously the words of his assistant, Gerard Malanga. Each painting in the "Disaster Series'' took about four minutes, he said. "We worked as mechanically as we could, but we made mistakes. The critics interpreted them as intentional.''
Worshipful words from critic Carter Ratcliff come to mind: "Warhol is secretly the vehicle of artistic intentions so complex that he would probably cease to function if he didn't dilute them with nightly doses of the inane.''
Warhol's own words deny such intentions: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” he famously said, “just look at the surface of my paintings . . . There's nothing below it . . . I want to be a machine.''
He wasn’t kidding. He attacked individuality, originality and everything else that art was in the '60s, and the real thing never quite recovered.
If it weren’t for the recent exhibit of Warhol's work at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, I wouldn't have brought him up. His art of slickness and shallowness is enough to send those of us who shrink from the emotional excesses of Baroque art at Florida’s Ringling Museum running there for relief.
It was no accident that Warhol used silkscreen prints for his celebrity portraits, including those of Elvis, Marilyn, Jackie and Martha Graham. With such a reprinting technique, he could reproduce an image over and over for the most stale, impersonal look. Warhol repeated his images in mechanical reproduction ad nauseum with photographic enlargements that he silkscreened onto canvas. He made wallpaper-pattern reprints of these, glorifying their sameness and their mass-production.
This muse-less master of the mundane repeated the look of Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles just as he had the face of Jackie Kennedy in her bloodied pillbox hat after her husband's assassination. He made wallpaper out of her image, too. And in the repetition, he numbed our perception. He gave us aesthetic emptiness.
He once said that anything is boring if you look at it long enough. He loved being bored and wanted to be a machine - blank and cold. In the catalogue for his first retrospective show in '68, held at the Moerna Museet, Stockholm, he said, "I like boring things . . . If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and there I am. There's nothing behind it."
I could cry – not only over what Warhol did, but because Pop Art lives on extolling banality, deifying detachment and disassociation. Gone is metaphor, allusion, that part of life that lies beneath outward appearance. When Leonardo painted his celebrated ``Virgin of the Rocks,'' he added a soft glow emanating from within the figure. It beats any depiction of a halo. There's more to art than messages. There's mystery. I just wish Pop Art would go away, already.
No such luck. Art, the so-called food of the soul, is processed now, far from fresh and as far removed from human experience as a TV screen, and I blame Warhol. This Chauncy Gardiner of picturemaking, who liked to watch life rather than live it, succeeded in turning art into a banality that deifies detachment. I'm thinking of the 3-foot-tall mound of synthetic excrement and the splotch of plastic vomit seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the ‘90s. I hold Warhol's deadpan expressions accountable for such crap.
Not that Pop wasn’t OK in the '60s, when it first burst onto the art scene out of rebellion against abstract expressionism's messy inwardness. But by now, I miss the Zen-like calligraphy of Robert Motherwell, who pioneered abstract expressionism. He was my teacher, so I'm probably biased, but I miss a&e’s ampageousness.
I shuddered at the news a couple of years ago when a Warhol; painting of a Campbell soup can , sold at a Christie’s auction for $11.7 million. Bad enough that he imitated soup cans. But it wasn't even his idea. In a Warhol biography in '89, author Victor Bockris related the genesis of the soup can paintings.
Warhol had just come out of a "nervous breakdown" and feared he might be slipping towards another after seeing a show of fellow Pop artist Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures of underwear, ice cream and pies. Warhol was upset because he didn't think of it.
The soup can paintings came out of a conversation between Warhol and a struggling interior designer Muriel Latow. Warhol was intent on doing something big in art, but he didn't know what.
Warhol: "It's too late for the cartoons," he said, alluding to the fact that Roy Lichtenstein already was doing that. "I've got to do something that will have a lot of impact, that will be different from Lichtenstein and Rosenquist, that will be very personal, that won't look like I'm doing exactly what they're doing. I don't know what to do! Muriel, you've got fabulous ideas. Can't you give me an idea?"
(She agreed if he would pay her for the idea).
Warhol: "How much?"
Latow: "Fifty dollars."
Warhol: "OK, go ahead," he said after writing out a check. "Give me a fabulous idea!"
Latow: "What do you like most in the whole world?"
Warhol: "I don't know. What do I like most in the whole world?"
Latow: "Money. You should paint pictures of money."
Warhol: "Oh gee, that really is a great idea"
Latow: "You should paint something that everybody sees every day, that everybody recognizes --- like a can of soup."
Fifty dollarsa turned out to be the bargain of the century when you consider the market value of Warhol’s work. – a head-scratcher, especially of you compare the $11.7 million for his soup can to auction sales of work by painters like Picasso and Monet. Picasso's "Le Repos" painted in 1932, said to be his greatest period, fetched $7.9 million. Monet's "Matinee Sur la Seine," part of a series that was the precursor to the famous "Waterlilies" series, sold for $5,725,750. Warhol outsold Picasso and Monet.
Muriel Latow was gypped.
And he acted out that wanting. He used to sit in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan dolled up in wild white wigs, sunglasses and a James Dean leasther jacket, hoping to be noticed.
Also helping him get noticed were the celebrity portraits he painted, like Marilyn Monroe's after she died and Jackie Kennedy Onassis' after she was widowed. Following the deaths of Monroe and President Kennedy, Warhol began his "Disaster Series,'' such as the "Electric Chair.'' After he was shot by one of his groupies, his work grew still darker with images of skull, gun and knife.
You might think that such imagery reflects on the violence in America society, but not if you take seriously the words of his assistant, Gerard Malanga. Each painting in the "Disaster Series'' took about four minutes, he said. "We worked as mechanically as we could, but we made mistakes. The critics interpreted them as intentional.''
Worshipful words from critic Carter Ratcliff come to mind: "Warhol is secretly the vehicle of artistic intentions so complex that he would probably cease to function if he didn't dilute them with nightly doses of the inane.''
Warhol's own words deny such intentions: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” he famously said, “just look at the surface of my paintings . . . There's nothing below it . . . I want to be a machine.''
He wasn’t kidding. He attacked individuality, originality and everything else that art was in the '60s, and the real thing never quite recovered.
If it weren’t for the recent exhibit of Warhol's work at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, I wouldn't have brought him up. His art of slickness and shallowness is enough to send those of us who shrink from the emotional excesses of Baroque art at Florida’s Ringling Museum running there for relief.
It was no accident that Warhol used silkscreen prints for his celebrity portraits, including those of Elvis, Marilyn, Jackie and Martha Graham. With such a reprinting technique, he could reproduce an image over and over for the most stale, impersonal look. Warhol repeated his images in mechanical reproduction ad nauseum with photographic enlargements that he silkscreened onto canvas. He made wallpaper-pattern reprints of these, glorifying their sameness and their mass-production.
This muse-less master of the mundane repeated the look of Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles just as he had the face of Jackie Kennedy in her bloodied pillbox hat after her husband's assassination. He made wallpaper out of her image, too. And in the repetition, he numbed our perception. He gave us aesthetic emptiness.
He once said that anything is boring if you look at it long enough. He loved being bored and wanted to be a machine - blank and cold. In the catalogue for his first retrospective show in '68, held at the Moerna Museet, Stockholm, he said, "I like boring things . . . If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and there I am. There's nothing behind it."
I could cry – not only over what Warhol did, but because Pop Art lives on extolling banality, deifying detachment and disassociation. Gone is metaphor, allusion, that part of life that lies beneath outward appearance. When Leonardo painted his celebrated ``Virgin of the Rocks,'' he added a soft glow emanating from within the figure. It beats any depiction of a halo. There's more to art than messages. There's mystery. I just wish Pop Art would go away, already.
No such luck. Art, the so-called food of the soul, is processed now, far from fresh and as far removed from human experience as a TV screen, and I blame Warhol. This Chauncy Gardiner of picturemaking, who liked to watch life rather than live it, succeeded in turning art into a banality that deifies detachment. I'm thinking of the 3-foot-tall mound of synthetic excrement and the splotch of plastic vomit seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the ‘90s. I hold Warhol's deadpan expressions accountable for such crap.
Not that Pop wasn’t OK in the '60s, when it first burst onto the art scene out of rebellion against abstract expressionism's messy inwardness. But by now, I miss the Zen-like calligraphy of Robert Motherwell, who pioneered abstract expressionism. He was my teacher, so I'm probably biased, but I miss a&e’s ampageousness.
I shuddered at the news a couple of years ago when a Warhol; painting of a Campbell soup can , sold at a Christie’s auction for $11.7 million. Bad enough that he imitated soup cans. But it wasn't even his idea. In a Warhol biography in '89, author Victor Bockris related the genesis of the soup can paintings.
Warhol had just come out of a "nervous breakdown" and feared he might be slipping towards another after seeing a show of fellow Pop artist Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures of underwear, ice cream and pies. Warhol was upset because he didn't think of it.
The soup can paintings came out of a conversation between Warhol and a struggling interior designer Muriel Latow. Warhol was intent on doing something big in art, but he didn't know what.
Warhol: "It's too late for the cartoons," he said, alluding to the fact that Roy Lichtenstein already was doing that. "I've got to do something that will have a lot of impact, that will be different from Lichtenstein and Rosenquist, that will be very personal, that won't look like I'm doing exactly what they're doing. I don't know what to do! Muriel, you've got fabulous ideas. Can't you give me an idea?"
(She agreed if he would pay her for the idea).
Warhol: "How much?"
Latow: "Fifty dollars."
Warhol: "OK, go ahead," he said after writing out a check. "Give me a fabulous idea!"
Latow: "What do you like most in the whole world?"
Warhol: "I don't know. What do I like most in the whole world?"
Latow: "Money. You should paint pictures of money."
Warhol: "Oh gee, that really is a great idea"
Latow: "You should paint something that everybody sees every day, that everybody recognizes --- like a can of soup."
Fifty dollarsa turned out to be the bargain of the century when you consider the market value of Warhol’s work. – a head-scratcher, especially of you compare the $11.7 million for his soup can to auction sales of work by painters like Picasso and Monet. Picasso's "Le Repos" painted in 1932, said to be his greatest period, fetched $7.9 million. Monet's "Matinee Sur la Seine," part of a series that was the precursor to the famous "Waterlilies" series, sold for $5,725,750. Warhol outsold Picasso and Monet.
Muriel Latow was gypped.
Top 200
Polls show that the difference between British and American connoisseurship is the difference m between a Picasso and a picture postcard.
Picasso came in first in the recent British survey - “The Times Top 200 Artists of the 20th century to Now.” In contrast, a ‘90s survey of America’s “most wanted” and “most unwanted” imagery called “People’s Choice” showed that the least favorite imagery had the look of Picasso’s cubism. America’s “most wanted” was a pictorial of historical figures posed in a paradisical springtime setting full with frolicking deer beneath pristine blue skies.The only thing missing were kittens chasing yarn balls.
"Best" lists are a commonplace and not just in art. Itemizations like Random House's "100 Best English Language Novels" and the American Film Institute's top 100 "Greatest Movies of All Time" come to mind. The biggest problem with such lists is the danger of taking them too seriously. But guess what? I have a “best” list, too.
My criteria comes ouf of something Picasso said: "What do you think an artist is, an imbecile who has only eyes? On the contrary, he's at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heart-rending, fiery or happy events, to which he responds in every way."
Best American artists in no particular order:
GEORGE SEGAL, 147th on Britain’s top 200 list.
"Walk - Don't Walk" 1976.
Sculptural situations that show life-size white plaster casts of anonymous-looking figures placed in real-looking environments are signs of the times: people lost, overtaken by places, events.
EDWARD HOPPER, 29th on Britain’s list.
"Nighthawks" 1942.
The impassive look of bored, lonely figures in a diner, underlining their isolation and alienation from themselves and the world around them, is the story of many in a rootless century.
JACOB LAWRENCE
"War Series, Going Home," 1947.
Flattened, angular forms, which are ornamental and festively colored, tell deceptively simple stories of black culture in America. They’re also loaded with social conscience.
SUSAN ROTHENBERG
"Hector Protector," 1976.
Mixing abstract and real, painter Rothenberg creates sketchy images - horses, mostly - silhouetted against obscure, thickly painted backgrounds that tends to muffle, even stifle the animals, which makes them emblems of Everyman struggling to be, to rise above the mire.
EVA HESSE 61st on Britain’s list
"Repetition," 1968
With an inventive use of materials, such as rubber tubing and wire, Hesse created sculpture at once emotional and mysterious. Maybe it's because I know that she was born Jewish in Nazi Germany, that her parents divorced, that her mother committed suicide, that her own marriage failed, that she suffered from a brain tumor, and that she worked from a wheelchair to the end, but her work puts that ache in the throat I was talking about. It's also gorgeous in its way.
BEN SHAHN
"Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti," 1932
Shahn was a social realist whose subjects were topical and usually about class struggle. He used incisive line to show society's scapegoats and underdogs that, for their deadpan looks, can break your heart.
ALICE NEEL
"Warhol," 1970
A portrait painter who rendered her subjects, usually posed staring straight out at the viewer, with a raw quality and a trademark directness that etches your brain.
LOUISE NEVELSON
"Sky Cathedral," 1958
By arranging found wooden furniture and buildings parts — knobs, moldings, chair slats — sculptor Nevelson created shrinelike displays with a message. By themselves, the wooden parts have little impact. In relation to each other, they take on a spiritual air.
MARK ROTHKO (28th on Britain’s list)
"Black on Maroon," 1959
His way of painting rectangles - hovering one over the other so they shimmer in gentle rhythm - is hypnotic. Like the movement of the sea, they’re something to meditate by.
For all the chutzpah it takes to made a “best” list, why not take it to the limit and name just one - the best picture that came out of the past 1,000 years? Criteria? A game-changer.
I nominate "Luncheon on the Grass'' ("Dejeuner sur l'Herbe'') that Manet painted in the middle of the 19th century. The painting defines the moment when traditional art became modern art. And beyond introducting a new era of art, it begat the sexual revolution, and maybe feminism, too. The painting shows two clothed men and a nude woman picnicking under the oaks and chestnut trees of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Which was not in itself revolutionary. Many Old Master paintings mixed clothed men with unclothed women.
Manet's painting differed in content and technique and the difference shocked high Parisian society. Even Emperor Napoleon III, who was not exactly a paragon of decency, called it "indecent.'' This, despite innumerable paintings of nude women over the past 1,000 years. "The Turkish Bath'' by Manet contemporary Jean August Ingres – describing a harem of nude females waiting for a call from their master - caused no stir at all.
The thing is that Manet’s painting wasn't allegorical or mythological. The woman pictured was real, even well-known as artist’s model and painter Victorine Meurend, who ran off to America with her lover after Manet finished the painting.
Something else in the painting was different. Meurend boldly stares back at you, as if you were intruding. "Yes?' she seems to ask over her shoulder, her face direct and challenging. Clearly it wasn't Meurend's nudity that offended, it was her face, which lacked the usual demure reticence of naked females in art. What’s more, this nude woman was actively engaged in conversation with men in public.
Compare Manet's scenario to the one of two clothed males and a pair of naked females by 15th-century painter Giorgione in "Concert Champetre.'' It's one of the Old Master paintings on which Manet based his painting. In Giorgione's rendition, the women are waiting on the men, who are talking only to each other. It's as if Manet whited out the double standard, replacing it with a woman in a social relationship with her male companions: minus the female passivity, vulnerability and the playing out of all the male fantasies known to art history.
To further see the difference Manet made with this painting, you have only to see, say, "Susannah and the Elders'' by 17th-century painter Sisto Badalocchi, in which clothed men are eyeing an undressed woman. Manet rebelled against the Badalocchis of the art world, who made erotic spectacles of women. He also rejected Renaissance painters who put naked women on pedestals as symbols of truth and beauty.
"Luncheon on the Grass'' refers to the past and moves art forward to a time when Robert Mapplethorpe could photograph body builder Lisa Lyons flexing her muscles in the nude in the Great Outdoors without a word of surprise from anyone.
Manet's technique, likewise, broke with long-held ways of painting. He used bold strokes and simple, unshaded shapes that he flattened to make more clear, and he filled his shadows with color. Not realism; not yet impressionism; call it "Manet-ism.''
Of course, before one can pick the best painting, one should answer the "What is art?'' question. I saved this for the last, so you could see the answer in Manet's painting. Art critic Charlotte Willard, who braved the what-is-art question in her book “What is a Masterpiece?” guided me here:
Art is a discovery. Manet brought painting outdoors, inspiring, by turn, a group of young painters who later became the Impressionists. His flattening of the female form without shading also led from realism to abstraction.
Art is visionary. You can't look at Meurend without knowing she is a contemporary woman, emancipated before women actually were.
Art gives form to our dreads and dreams. Manet didn't know at the time that he painted a revolutionary picture. He said to his friend Antonin Proust, "How foolish one must be to say that I am trying to fire pistol shots. I render as simple as I can things I see.'' Call me foolish.
Art remembers the past and predicts the future. Picasso's 1907 painting, "Les Demoisselles d'Avignon'' ("The Brothel of Avignon''), which introduced Cubism to the world, is a direct result of Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass.'' Picasso said it, himself: “When I see Manet's `Dejuener sur l'Herb,' I say to myself, `Trouble for later on.’”
The "later on'' came in his brothel picture, which was Picasso's "Luncheon on the Grass.'' Like Manet, he took an old theme - women as vessels of pleasure, and made them brutal looking.
I'm not prepared to say that Manet would have approved of what Picasso did to women in his painting. Or of what performance artist Carolee Schneemann did later in our century when she pulled a paper scroll from her vagina to read its text on "vulvic space,'' and called it art.
But I think it's fair to say that Manet was the first shock artist.
Picasso came in first in the recent British survey - “The Times Top 200 Artists of the 20th century to Now.” In contrast, a ‘90s survey of America’s “most wanted” and “most unwanted” imagery called “People’s Choice” showed that the least favorite imagery had the look of Picasso’s cubism. America’s “most wanted” was a pictorial of historical figures posed in a paradisical springtime setting full with frolicking deer beneath pristine blue skies.The only thing missing were kittens chasing yarn balls.
"Best" lists are a commonplace and not just in art. Itemizations like Random House's "100 Best English Language Novels" and the American Film Institute's top 100 "Greatest Movies of All Time" come to mind. The biggest problem with such lists is the danger of taking them too seriously. But guess what? I have a “best” list, too.
My criteria comes ouf of something Picasso said: "What do you think an artist is, an imbecile who has only eyes? On the contrary, he's at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heart-rending, fiery or happy events, to which he responds in every way."
Best American artists in no particular order:
GEORGE SEGAL, 147th on Britain’s top 200 list.
"Walk - Don't Walk" 1976.
Sculptural situations that show life-size white plaster casts of anonymous-looking figures placed in real-looking environments are signs of the times: people lost, overtaken by places, events.
EDWARD HOPPER, 29th on Britain’s list.
"Nighthawks" 1942.
The impassive look of bored, lonely figures in a diner, underlining their isolation and alienation from themselves and the world around them, is the story of many in a rootless century.
JACOB LAWRENCE
"War Series, Going Home," 1947.
Flattened, angular forms, which are ornamental and festively colored, tell deceptively simple stories of black culture in America. They’re also loaded with social conscience.
SUSAN ROTHENBERG
"Hector Protector," 1976.
Mixing abstract and real, painter Rothenberg creates sketchy images - horses, mostly - silhouetted against obscure, thickly painted backgrounds that tends to muffle, even stifle the animals, which makes them emblems of Everyman struggling to be, to rise above the mire.
EVA HESSE 61st on Britain’s list
"Repetition," 1968
With an inventive use of materials, such as rubber tubing and wire, Hesse created sculpture at once emotional and mysterious. Maybe it's because I know that she was born Jewish in Nazi Germany, that her parents divorced, that her mother committed suicide, that her own marriage failed, that she suffered from a brain tumor, and that she worked from a wheelchair to the end, but her work puts that ache in the throat I was talking about. It's also gorgeous in its way.
BEN SHAHN
"Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti," 1932
Shahn was a social realist whose subjects were topical and usually about class struggle. He used incisive line to show society's scapegoats and underdogs that, for their deadpan looks, can break your heart.
ALICE NEEL
"Warhol," 1970
A portrait painter who rendered her subjects, usually posed staring straight out at the viewer, with a raw quality and a trademark directness that etches your brain.
LOUISE NEVELSON
"Sky Cathedral," 1958
By arranging found wooden furniture and buildings parts — knobs, moldings, chair slats — sculptor Nevelson created shrinelike displays with a message. By themselves, the wooden parts have little impact. In relation to each other, they take on a spiritual air.
MARK ROTHKO (28th on Britain’s list)
"Black on Maroon," 1959
His way of painting rectangles - hovering one over the other so they shimmer in gentle rhythm - is hypnotic. Like the movement of the sea, they’re something to meditate by.
For all the chutzpah it takes to made a “best” list, why not take it to the limit and name just one - the best picture that came out of the past 1,000 years? Criteria? A game-changer.
I nominate "Luncheon on the Grass'' ("Dejeuner sur l'Herbe'') that Manet painted in the middle of the 19th century. The painting defines the moment when traditional art became modern art. And beyond introducting a new era of art, it begat the sexual revolution, and maybe feminism, too. The painting shows two clothed men and a nude woman picnicking under the oaks and chestnut trees of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Which was not in itself revolutionary. Many Old Master paintings mixed clothed men with unclothed women.
Manet's painting differed in content and technique and the difference shocked high Parisian society. Even Emperor Napoleon III, who was not exactly a paragon of decency, called it "indecent.'' This, despite innumerable paintings of nude women over the past 1,000 years. "The Turkish Bath'' by Manet contemporary Jean August Ingres – describing a harem of nude females waiting for a call from their master - caused no stir at all.
The thing is that Manet’s painting wasn't allegorical or mythological. The woman pictured was real, even well-known as artist’s model and painter Victorine Meurend, who ran off to America with her lover after Manet finished the painting.
Something else in the painting was different. Meurend boldly stares back at you, as if you were intruding. "Yes?' she seems to ask over her shoulder, her face direct and challenging. Clearly it wasn't Meurend's nudity that offended, it was her face, which lacked the usual demure reticence of naked females in art. What’s more, this nude woman was actively engaged in conversation with men in public.
Compare Manet's scenario to the one of two clothed males and a pair of naked females by 15th-century painter Giorgione in "Concert Champetre.'' It's one of the Old Master paintings on which Manet based his painting. In Giorgione's rendition, the women are waiting on the men, who are talking only to each other. It's as if Manet whited out the double standard, replacing it with a woman in a social relationship with her male companions: minus the female passivity, vulnerability and the playing out of all the male fantasies known to art history.
To further see the difference Manet made with this painting, you have only to see, say, "Susannah and the Elders'' by 17th-century painter Sisto Badalocchi, in which clothed men are eyeing an undressed woman. Manet rebelled against the Badalocchis of the art world, who made erotic spectacles of women. He also rejected Renaissance painters who put naked women on pedestals as symbols of truth and beauty.
"Luncheon on the Grass'' refers to the past and moves art forward to a time when Robert Mapplethorpe could photograph body builder Lisa Lyons flexing her muscles in the nude in the Great Outdoors without a word of surprise from anyone.
Manet's technique, likewise, broke with long-held ways of painting. He used bold strokes and simple, unshaded shapes that he flattened to make more clear, and he filled his shadows with color. Not realism; not yet impressionism; call it "Manet-ism.''
Of course, before one can pick the best painting, one should answer the "What is art?'' question. I saved this for the last, so you could see the answer in Manet's painting. Art critic Charlotte Willard, who braved the what-is-art question in her book “What is a Masterpiece?” guided me here:
Art is a discovery. Manet brought painting outdoors, inspiring, by turn, a group of young painters who later became the Impressionists. His flattening of the female form without shading also led from realism to abstraction.
Art is visionary. You can't look at Meurend without knowing she is a contemporary woman, emancipated before women actually were.
Art gives form to our dreads and dreams. Manet didn't know at the time that he painted a revolutionary picture. He said to his friend Antonin Proust, "How foolish one must be to say that I am trying to fire pistol shots. I render as simple as I can things I see.'' Call me foolish.
Art remembers the past and predicts the future. Picasso's 1907 painting, "Les Demoisselles d'Avignon'' ("The Brothel of Avignon''), which introduced Cubism to the world, is a direct result of Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass.'' Picasso said it, himself: “When I see Manet's `Dejuener sur l'Herb,' I say to myself, `Trouble for later on.’”
The "later on'' came in his brothel picture, which was Picasso's "Luncheon on the Grass.'' Like Manet, he took an old theme - women as vessels of pleasure, and made them brutal looking.
I'm not prepared to say that Manet would have approved of what Picasso did to women in his painting. Or of what performance artist Carolee Schneemann did later in our century when she pulled a paper scroll from her vagina to read its text on "vulvic space,'' and called it art.
But I think it's fair to say that Manet was the first shock artist.
The Elgin Marbles
It looks like the British Museum has run out of excuses for keeping its cache of stolen property known as the Elgin Marbles.
The long-running reason for not returning the 253 sculptures, which Lord Elgin lifted from Athen’s Parthenon in 1861 and sold to the museum, was that the Greeks didn’t care enough to take proper care of them.
Greece’s new 226,000-square-foot, $200 million state-of-the-art museum at the base of the Acropolis answers that charge. But the answer came long before.
Consider this: when the Turks, who occupied Athens in the early 1800s, ran out of bullets in battling the Greeks and began melting down the Parthenon's 2,300-year-old lead clamps for bullets, Greek soldiers sent bullets to the Turks to stop the defacing. So much for the Greeks not caring.
Indeed, if anyone can be faulted for careless, it’s the British Museum. William St. Clair, a British authority on the Elgin Marbles, told the London Observer some 10 years ago about a British Museum cover-up he discovered in the diaries of museum official Roger Hinks, which disclosed that the antiquities had been badly damaged at the museum.
Apparently, London's polluted air ate away at the marble because the museum didn't use proper air-quality filters until 1962. St. Clair also blamed the museum for a bungled cleaning in 1938 when metal scrapers were used to scrub the marble to an alabaster white in order to demonstrate classical perfection.
To mask the damaged surface, the museum coated the carvings with wax.
The cleaning was ordered by Lord Duveen of Milbank, the British Museum's benefactor, who, St. Clair said, made his fortune retouching old masters and selling them to gullible Americans.
Given all this, shouldn't the British Museum return the marbles? The answer would be easy if Elgin's robbery occurred after 1954. That's when an international convention was adopted requiring all art expatriated in times of war to be returned. A similar convention was adopted in 1970. It was on that basis that Iraq returned what it took from Kuwait's museum in 1990. In that spirit, while the Seattle Art Museum didn’t have to, it agreed to return a painting by Henri Matisse to the heirs of an art dealer whose collection the Nazis stole in France during World War II.
Clearly, my sympathies lie with the effort that Melina Mercouri made in 1983 when, as Greek minister of culture, she pleaded with the English to return the Elgin Marbles. As she famously said, “You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us. They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are our noblest symbol of excellence. They are a tribute to the democratic philosophy. They are our aspirations and our name. They are the essence of Greekness. In the world over, the very name of our country is immediately associated with the Parthenon.”
That said, though, I think there must be a statute of limitations on stolen goods, the cutoff on art being before 1954, when the rules were set.
The long-running reason for not returning the 253 sculptures, which Lord Elgin lifted from Athen’s Parthenon in 1861 and sold to the museum, was that the Greeks didn’t care enough to take proper care of them.
Greece’s new 226,000-square-foot, $200 million state-of-the-art museum at the base of the Acropolis answers that charge. But the answer came long before.
Consider this: when the Turks, who occupied Athens in the early 1800s, ran out of bullets in battling the Greeks and began melting down the Parthenon's 2,300-year-old lead clamps for bullets, Greek soldiers sent bullets to the Turks to stop the defacing. So much for the Greeks not caring.
Indeed, if anyone can be faulted for careless, it’s the British Museum. William St. Clair, a British authority on the Elgin Marbles, told the London Observer some 10 years ago about a British Museum cover-up he discovered in the diaries of museum official Roger Hinks, which disclosed that the antiquities had been badly damaged at the museum.
Apparently, London's polluted air ate away at the marble because the museum didn't use proper air-quality filters until 1962. St. Clair also blamed the museum for a bungled cleaning in 1938 when metal scrapers were used to scrub the marble to an alabaster white in order to demonstrate classical perfection.
To mask the damaged surface, the museum coated the carvings with wax.
The cleaning was ordered by Lord Duveen of Milbank, the British Museum's benefactor, who, St. Clair said, made his fortune retouching old masters and selling them to gullible Americans.
Given all this, shouldn't the British Museum return the marbles? The answer would be easy if Elgin's robbery occurred after 1954. That's when an international convention was adopted requiring all art expatriated in times of war to be returned. A similar convention was adopted in 1970. It was on that basis that Iraq returned what it took from Kuwait's museum in 1990. In that spirit, while the Seattle Art Museum didn’t have to, it agreed to return a painting by Henri Matisse to the heirs of an art dealer whose collection the Nazis stole in France during World War II.
Clearly, my sympathies lie with the effort that Melina Mercouri made in 1983 when, as Greek minister of culture, she pleaded with the English to return the Elgin Marbles. As she famously said, “You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us. They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are our noblest symbol of excellence. They are a tribute to the democratic philosophy. They are our aspirations and our name. They are the essence of Greekness. In the world over, the very name of our country is immediately associated with the Parthenon.”
That said, though, I think there must be a statute of limitations on stolen goods, the cutoff on art being before 1954, when the rules were set.
Is a picture worth a thousand words or not?
It’s often true that words hinder communication. Putting descriptive titles on paintings is a model for weakening a message. Clearly, some artists haven’t gotten the memo.
If art lovers are to be guided by explanatory titles, then art becomes little more than a visual aid, or worse - controversial for no good reason.
Andres Serrano title “Piss Christ” a photograph of a cross submerged in a jar urine, had unintended consequences. Without the title, the sunny glow of the urine lends incandescence to the cross, even splendor. If Serrano hadn’t named his image, it might have been interpreted as he intended: Christianity drowning in crassness, in commercialism.
Titling art too narrowly can have another sorry effect. It can beg the issue. “Icons of Loss,” the show title that holocaust survivor Samuel Bak gave his harrowing paintings, needlessly pushes the point, particularly since his works hang at the Florida Holocaust Museum.
Bak also titled each of his exhibit examples. How unnecessary are the labels? Even if you didn’t know that his painting series of a small boy with raised hands in a don’t-shoot pose is based on a Nazi photo documenting the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in ‘43, the imagery can leave you wrecked.
Not content with painting the boy bound with roped strips of splintered wood that form an “X,” Bak felt the need to title it “Crossed Out.” In a variation on the theme, Bak renders the boy in another work blindfolded and dissolving into the brick wall behind him. At this point, you can almost guess his title: “Walled In.”
This is a little like a film score that aims to manipulate the moviegoer with operatic sound. A lesser artist may need such devices, but Bak is too good a painter.
How good is he? In “Walled In,” he added a pictorial detail not found in the photograph: the boy’s socks sag, one already fallen around his ankles, leaving them at uneven heights. In this way, Bak wordlessly stresses that this is a small child under the gun.
Nicholas Ray did a similar thing when he directed the 1955 film “Rebel Without A Cause.” To heighten the drama of a boy accidentally killed by the police, Ray simply zoomed in on the dead boy’s unmatched socks. The sight was a silent reminder of innocence lost to death.
Lose the titles, Mr. Bak. Your pictures are enough to fasten viewers to the floor, as if standing at the edge of a hole.
If art lovers are to be guided by explanatory titles, then art becomes little more than a visual aid, or worse - controversial for no good reason.
Andres Serrano title “Piss Christ” a photograph of a cross submerged in a jar urine, had unintended consequences. Without the title, the sunny glow of the urine lends incandescence to the cross, even splendor. If Serrano hadn’t named his image, it might have been interpreted as he intended: Christianity drowning in crassness, in commercialism.
Titling art too narrowly can have another sorry effect. It can beg the issue. “Icons of Loss,” the show title that holocaust survivor Samuel Bak gave his harrowing paintings, needlessly pushes the point, particularly since his works hang at the Florida Holocaust Museum.
Bak also titled each of his exhibit examples. How unnecessary are the labels? Even if you didn’t know that his painting series of a small boy with raised hands in a don’t-shoot pose is based on a Nazi photo documenting the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in ‘43, the imagery can leave you wrecked.
Not content with painting the boy bound with roped strips of splintered wood that form an “X,” Bak felt the need to title it “Crossed Out.” In a variation on the theme, Bak renders the boy in another work blindfolded and dissolving into the brick wall behind him. At this point, you can almost guess his title: “Walled In.”
This is a little like a film score that aims to manipulate the moviegoer with operatic sound. A lesser artist may need such devices, but Bak is too good a painter.
How good is he? In “Walled In,” he added a pictorial detail not found in the photograph: the boy’s socks sag, one already fallen around his ankles, leaving them at uneven heights. In this way, Bak wordlessly stresses that this is a small child under the gun.
Nicholas Ray did a similar thing when he directed the 1955 film “Rebel Without A Cause.” To heighten the drama of a boy accidentally killed by the police, Ray simply zoomed in on the dead boy’s unmatched socks. The sight was a silent reminder of innocence lost to death.
Lose the titles, Mr. Bak. Your pictures are enough to fasten viewers to the floor, as if standing at the edge of a hole.
A nonsense show from a museum that should know better
The news that the Centre Pompidou purged its collection galleries of male-made work for a near-year-long, women-only show was bad news. Women-only shows tend to ghettoizes women and there’s been enough of that. Even if an historical corrective were needed, it’s not good to isolate art by gender. The separation only reinforces the divide.
But those days of denying women their place in art history have been gone for quite a while. The beginning of the end may have come back in the '40s when O'Keeffe was invited to participate in a women's art exhibit. Rather than simply decline that invitation, she walked into the gallery to tell the gallery director she wasn't a "woman painter.''
So, when the Pompidou empties out two floors for ladies rooms only, the question goes pleading: Why is a stronghold of 20th and 21st century artrectifying a record already rectified? The question takes on extra weight when you realize that the French never showed the bias against women artists that the Americans did. (Note all the all–women shows in the U.S, not to mention an entire institution devoted to female-made art – The National Museum of Women in the Arts in D.C. Besides ghettoizing women, it shift focus away from art to advocacy of women's rights, and they don't need to do that.
How did women prevail? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em would seem to have been their marching order. Berthe Morisot, for example, braved the disdain of Renoir and Degas for women artists and joined the Impressionists. Had she created her own group, she might not have been taken so seriously.
Morison managed to convey her female complaint in her work. You can see it in “Reading." (La Lecture) at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, which looks like a simple picture of a young woman reading. But look again.
The space where she sits is tightly wrapped in foliage and balcony rails. That she included a bird cage may also speak of confinement. At the same time, the figure is self-contained as an egg, likely because she has escaped into the book she's reading.
In a way, Morisot escaped, too, with spontaneous and fleeting brushwork, which must have been very freeing to her. And drenching the image with light may also have been her way of conveying her sense of escape. As well, the focus on the females' face absorbed in her book rather than on idle play seems to complete the story of a woman bent on being taken seriously.
Morisot said it herself: "I don't think there's ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal. And that's all I would have asked, for I know I'm worth as much as they."
But that was all then and this is now. When Pompidou Center, Paris’ citadel of contemporary and modern art, seeks to replace its collection of male art with that of females, it seems nothing more than a look back in anger.
But those days of denying women their place in art history have been gone for quite a while. The beginning of the end may have come back in the '40s when O'Keeffe was invited to participate in a women's art exhibit. Rather than simply decline that invitation, she walked into the gallery to tell the gallery director she wasn't a "woman painter.''
So, when the Pompidou empties out two floors for ladies rooms only, the question goes pleading: Why is a stronghold of 20th and 21st century artrectifying a record already rectified? The question takes on extra weight when you realize that the French never showed the bias against women artists that the Americans did. (Note all the all–women shows in the U.S, not to mention an entire institution devoted to female-made art – The National Museum of Women in the Arts in D.C. Besides ghettoizing women, it shift focus away from art to advocacy of women's rights, and they don't need to do that.
How did women prevail? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em would seem to have been their marching order. Berthe Morisot, for example, braved the disdain of Renoir and Degas for women artists and joined the Impressionists. Had she created her own group, she might not have been taken so seriously.
Morison managed to convey her female complaint in her work. You can see it in “Reading." (La Lecture) at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, which looks like a simple picture of a young woman reading. But look again.
The space where she sits is tightly wrapped in foliage and balcony rails. That she included a bird cage may also speak of confinement. At the same time, the figure is self-contained as an egg, likely because she has escaped into the book she's reading.
In a way, Morisot escaped, too, with spontaneous and fleeting brushwork, which must have been very freeing to her. And drenching the image with light may also have been her way of conveying her sense of escape. As well, the focus on the females' face absorbed in her book rather than on idle play seems to complete the story of a woman bent on being taken seriously.
Morisot said it herself: "I don't think there's ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal. And that's all I would have asked, for I know I'm worth as much as they."
But that was all then and this is now. When Pompidou Center, Paris’ citadel of contemporary and modern art, seeks to replace its collection of male art with that of females, it seems nothing more than a look back in anger.
Stadium design as a dining hall
“Take me out to the ballgame,” isn’t the main idea in baseball,
anymore. Consider Tropicana Field, a.k.a. the Trop, in St.
Petersburg, the dome-topped home of American League
East’s Tampa Bay Rays. In 1996, it got made over from
a functional field to a dining, shopping, entertainment complex.
Seen from the highway, the dome slants down on one side like
a beret worn nonchalantly. The tilt sinks from 225 feet above
second base to 85 feet at the center field wall, and appears
downright debonair. The pitch of this roof, which reduces the
volume of stadium air needing climate control, was an economy measure. You get that point on arrival.
While the angle of the dome looks rakish from a distance, it
just looks lopsided up close. The attempt to save money is
made clear by the grim look of the inside walls: bare concrete, mostly in a sulking shade of gray – like a subway station.
It doesn’t matter how many Cuesta-Ray Cigar Bars, Monsta Lobsta stands or how much Spanish, Thai and French cuisine abound, the
crude stone of the interior walls seem unwelcoming, even forbidding. And the myriad points of food sale, which push at the gloom, only serve to define the Trop as a kind of tourist trap.
Granted, the eight-story-high rotunda entrance pays homage to the one that heralded Ebbets Field, built in 1913. But a 900-foot-long ceramic mosaic walkway that leads to the rotunda, complete with theatrical lighting and piped-in music, has nothing to do with baseball.
And because the dome is not retractable, there is no wind, no
rain, no sun at the Trop. There is no flag rippling in the air with
the singing of the National Anthem. Old glory stretches out
stiffly, like the one planted on the moon. Catwalks under the
mammoth tent-like dome – looking like high-wire rigging –
conjure up the circus at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
The field? Covered in artificial turf, only the dirt is real. After an
inning of play, it smudges, turning the turf into what looks like a
carpet in need of vacuuming after toddlers – in from their sandboxes – track it up. It’s the game of summer, but sitting under a glass-roofed rotunda, you wouldn’t know what season it is.
F. Scott Fitzgerald called baseball a game bounded by walls
that keep out novelty and change. Clealy, he never frequented
the Trop. It doesn’t focus on the sport. It’s multi-purpose, like
a reversible raincoat.
anymore. Consider Tropicana Field, a.k.a. the Trop, in St.
Petersburg, the dome-topped home of American League
East’s Tampa Bay Rays. In 1996, it got made over from
a functional field to a dining, shopping, entertainment complex.
Seen from the highway, the dome slants down on one side like
a beret worn nonchalantly. The tilt sinks from 225 feet above
second base to 85 feet at the center field wall, and appears
downright debonair. The pitch of this roof, which reduces the
volume of stadium air needing climate control, was an economy measure. You get that point on arrival.
While the angle of the dome looks rakish from a distance, it
just looks lopsided up close. The attempt to save money is
made clear by the grim look of the inside walls: bare concrete, mostly in a sulking shade of gray – like a subway station.
It doesn’t matter how many Cuesta-Ray Cigar Bars, Monsta Lobsta stands or how much Spanish, Thai and French cuisine abound, the
crude stone of the interior walls seem unwelcoming, even forbidding. And the myriad points of food sale, which push at the gloom, only serve to define the Trop as a kind of tourist trap.
Granted, the eight-story-high rotunda entrance pays homage to the one that heralded Ebbets Field, built in 1913. But a 900-foot-long ceramic mosaic walkway that leads to the rotunda, complete with theatrical lighting and piped-in music, has nothing to do with baseball.
And because the dome is not retractable, there is no wind, no
rain, no sun at the Trop. There is no flag rippling in the air with
the singing of the National Anthem. Old glory stretches out
stiffly, like the one planted on the moon. Catwalks under the
mammoth tent-like dome – looking like high-wire rigging –
conjure up the circus at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
The field? Covered in artificial turf, only the dirt is real. After an
inning of play, it smudges, turning the turf into what looks like a
carpet in need of vacuuming after toddlers – in from their sandboxes – track it up. It’s the game of summer, but sitting under a glass-roofed rotunda, you wouldn’t know what season it is.
F. Scott Fitzgerald called baseball a game bounded by walls
that keep out novelty and change. Clealy, he never frequented
the Trop. It doesn’t focus on the sport. It’s multi-purpose, like
a reversible raincoat.
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