Culture

Paul Signac’s portrait of Félix Fénéon is a striking and historically important painting. But is it a good one? Its subject didn’t think so. Signac profiles Fénéon against a swirl of complementary colors and kaleidoscopic shapes, as if anticipating an acid-trip scene from a Roger Corman movie. This radioactively abstract background was bold stuff for Paris in 1890, when the picture was made, but contemporary critics disapproved, one finding the work ‘cold and dry’, another calling it ‘neither decorative nor comprehensible in terms of feeling’. Fénéon himself was similarly vexed by the final result, though he held onto the portrait throughout his life out of loyalty to his painter friend.

‘I’m sitting here struggling for words and my friend nailed it: “She was our Princess Leia.”’ With those words, Dr Esther Choo, Yale Medical School graduate, holder of an Ivy League English diploma and possessor of 168,000 Twitter followers, memorialized the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A century ago, a citizen of Justice Ginsburg’s stature might have inspired references to the Bible, classical history or the great figures of America’s founding. But in the year 2020, a lifetime of achievement brings no greater honor than to be compared with a Disney-owned property whose action figure you can buy for $10.99.

In the early Thirties, when impoverished Americans were cramming into shanty towns called ‘Hoovervilles’, another Hoover created an industrial building of rare magnificence in west London. Driving into London from Heathrow airport, we see acres of nondescript suburbs. The Hoover Building at Perivale, about five miles from the West End, still astounds. Set back from the road in well-manicured gardens, this art deco masterpiece rises in brilliant white (due to the use of a cement called Snowcrete), its façade laced with angular green trim and sunburst decoration. The Hoover Building was the British factory of the Hoover Company, the Ohio-based vacuum-cleaner manufacturer.

Pop music is tribalist by nature and divisive by desire. It was always the Beatles or the Stones, mods or rockers, burn the Beatles’ records or ‘hang the DJ’ and, most important of all, Bob Marley or Big Youth? (The answer is Big Youth.) Only one man transcended this nonsense: Frederick Nathaniel ‘Toots’ Hibbert. Anyone who has heard Toots but doesn’t dig his mighty soul skank should be cast into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights of good, hard thinking. Toots died on September 11 in his native Jamaica. He was 77, allegedly the victim of complications from COVID-19. The man may have gone, but his vibrations will live on as long as mankind has ears to listen and feet to dance.

Dr John called James Booker ‘the best black, gay, one-eyed pianist New Orleans has ever produced’. Booker died in 1983, aged 43, ruined by drugs, drink and madness, and attended by legends of delinquency lurid even for a New Orleans piano ‘professor’. Though he had appeared on plenty of other people’s records and stages, Booker had recorded only three studio albums in his lifetime. Classified, recorded in October 1982 and now re-released on vinyl, was the last of them. It might not be the best of them, but it shows why Booker was one of the greats. The studio was booked for three days, but Booker had a breakdown the week before and couldn’t get a good take down in the first two days.

Almost the best thing about Cobra Kai is the response, somewhere between bemused and appalled, it has generated among woke millennials and Gen Z-ers. One reviewer noted with concern that neither of the two featured karate schools is run by someone of Japanese ethnicity. Another squirmed at two middle-aged men’s almost Trump-level inappropriateness, when while discussing the qualities of a mutual old flame they referred to their inamorata’s ‘tightness’. Yes. It’s one of the reasons we Eighties dinosaurs love it so. Cobra Kai is our safe space. It’s our Helm’s Deep of unreconstructed sexism in an otherwise Orcish horde-overrun Middle Earth of gender fluidity, #MeToo and micro-aggressions.

A kind of gigantism took hold of the European mind in the years before World War One. It shaped everything, from empires to poetry. In the confidence of new technology and new ideas, things could be attempted on a larger scale than ever before. The mental power of the age could be measured in the sheer size of the things it produced. This might be ‘Jacky’ Fisher’s Dreadnought of 1906, which set off a European arms race in huge battleships, or a great construction — the Victoria memorial in front of Buckingham Palace is nothing to the one built in Kolkata.

On March 14, 1847, Eugène Delacroix made a trip to the studio of his colleague and countryman Camille Corot. Later that day, Delacroix recorded in his journal a feeling of newfound appreciation for the painter’s landscapes: ‘Corot is a true artist. One has to see a painter in his own place to get an idea of his worth.’ The Corot paintings that Delacroix had recently viewed at the Paris Salon seemed to hold new meaning after his seeing the site of their creation. As to exactly what had changed, or what he saw that changed it, Delacroix does not — perhaps could not — tell us. Few modern painters can claim as close a kinship to the spirit of Corot as Paul Resika.

The architectural historian Andrew Alpern has for decades done the dirty work when it comes to pre-war New York apartments. Others have presented glossy coffee-table books full of newly commissioned professional photographs. Alpern has focused on the practical details of apartment design, especially floor plans, which tell us so much about how people actually live in their apartments, or at least were originally meant to. His Apartments for the Affluent (1975), Historic Manhattan Apartment Houses (1996) and New York Apartment Houses of Rosario Candela and James Carpenter (2002) are essential compendia; anyone with an interest in New York residential architecture, especially of the magnificent variety, must have them. The more industrious uptown real estate agents also find them useful.

The Obamas loved Hamilton. It was the biggest show to hit Broadway since Cats or Rent, with ticket prices reaching four digits. Michelle, who urgently needs to read Buddenbrooks or visit the Sistine Chapel, called Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical the ‘best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen in my life’. Hamilton was present at the dawn and eclipse of the Obama years. Miranda first publicly shared material from the musical at the White House’s inaugural Spoken Word evening in 2009. Seven years later, Lin-Manuel joined Barack for a cringe-inducing freestyle rap in the Rose Garden.

When I was a teenager whiling away the endless hours with VHS video rentals, Vietnam movies were pretty much the only game in town. I must have watched The Deerhunter a dozen times, and the scene in the rat-infested river cage well over a hundred times. Even now, I can’t watch it without being surprised at how De Niro manages to pull off that extraordinary escape stunt. My, how I covet those tiger-stripe Special Forces camouflage fatigues. The problem is, The Deerhunter has loads of boring non-war stuff either side of the good bits. That’s why I much prefer Platoon — controversial choice, Oliver Stone being a pinko — all of which takes place in-country.

Art historians do not generally become household names, as Kenneth Clark did later in life after embracing television, most famously with Civilisation (1969). They can, however, acquire legendary or semilegendary status within the profession and among amateurs. One such was Leo Steinberg (1920-2011), who taught for many years at the City University of New York and the University of Pennsylvania. Academic art historians are expected to ‘publish or perish’: college texts, monographic studies on individual artists, or down-the-rabbit-hole treatises on arcana that seem to require more pages of footnotes than text. Steinberg mainly wrote for professional journals. He also lectured widely, testing ideas that later might make their way into print.

The everyday experience of 2020 includes televised demagogy and a national media making pure spectacle out of domestic terrorism and race riots. The less we believe what we see, the stranger the sights become. These experiences are also the story of Network, the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky/Sidney Lumet hit which won four Oscars out of its 10 nominations. We must ask ourselves why are we living out the 1970s again and, indeed, enacting its satire in deadly earnest. Marx said history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, but what did he know of Hollywood? A remake is the safest bet. We, however, have reversed Marx’s sequence.

Few artworks could be more responsive to the current upheaval than Jacob Lawrence’s 1954-56 series ‘Struggle...From the History of the American People’. Painted during the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, the cycle of 30 panels tells a history of the American Founding through punchy modernist vignettes, engaging with timely and timeless topics such as brutality, race, memory, justice and our shared national heritage. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 24 of the original panels have been reunited for the most complete exhibition of the series since its original showing more than six decades ago. The exhibition will travel to Birmingham, Seattle and Washington, DC from New York.

One of the many things I love about the horribly addictive French spy series The Bureau is that it never attempts to improve you with pious little homilies about how foreigners are just the same as us, with values just as worthy as our own, so they should be treated with the same amount of respect, for are we not all children of God? If The Bureau — about the DGSE, France’s equivalent of the CIA — had been made in the US, there would be a specially created nice, upstanding, Americanized Muslim character like the agent in The Looming Tower or the implausible black Muslim character in Jack Ryan.

As the weird world of lockdown winds down, we might pause to consider what we’ve learned. I am hardly alone in my heightened hankering to unravel, synthesize, undo and discard. In this mission a voice from the past is helping me piece things together anew as the strange tyranny begins to dissolve. It began when Google started throwing videos of the Smiths in my daily cyberpath, prompting a non-essential trip down Memory Lane. Back in the day, I was, as David Cameron used to boast, a ‘huge fan’ of the Smiths. Precisely, I was a fan of Johnny Marr’s guitar literacy and the persona of Morrissey, the enchanting singer who had jettisoned his given names.

Every civilization needs its barbarians. Lazy, filthy, dumb and dangerous, the barbarian, real or imagined, is the eternal grindstone on which the civilized sharpen their prejudices. They are, as the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy wrote, ‘a solution of a sort’ — but to what? In Cavafy’s poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (1898), an unnamed city is gripped by cultural torpor and political sloth. The gridlocked citizens, weakened by indolence and luxury, dream of a bloody release from their troubles. Disaster, a visit from the barbarians, becomes their last hope for rebirth. You don’t need to be a specialist to see the parallels between the poem and the illicit undercurrents of politics in the 2010s.

It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premiered his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. ‘I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,’ wrote young Wolfgang back to his sister Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’), excitedly. ‘They hang them just as they do in Lyons.’ He was already something of a connoisseur of public executions. The Mozarts had spent four weeks in Lyons in 1766, and, as the music historian Stanley Sadie points out, Leopold had clearly taken his son (10) and daughter (15) along to a hanging ‘for a jolly treat one free afternoon’.

You’re familiar, no doubt, with the term ‘red pill’, the Matrix-inspired metaphor that’s become a catch-all for the type of right-wing thinking that thrives in the dark corners of the internet. Now the journalist Katie Herzog, in an admittedly tongue-in-cheek comment, might well have given us a new term: the purple pill. To take the purple pill, inferring from Herzog’s outlook, is to oppose the dangerous excesses of identity politics, but also the reactionary extremes of the red-pillers. This is, simply, a compromise — or the kind of terminally sensible position that shouldn’t need corny movie metaphors in the first place. But you see her point.

Statues do more than monumentalize individual achievement. They embody the self-image of those who raise, cherish and preserve them. It is this common self-conception that is being upended by the wave of iconoclasm that is sweeping through American cities. The race to raze structures that have stood untouched for decades or centuries disturbs because, instead of reassessing the past, it attacks it to reorder the present. Wherever you stand on this, the ‘debate’ is limited by Western visual traditions and stunted by patchy education. In Wisconsin, the abolitionist Hans Christian Heg was yanked down. In San Francisco, Ulysses S. Grant, a president who set the US Army on the Klan, was deposed. In Washington, DC, Gandhi, once praised by W.E.B.

Unpopular opinion: film noir is dull, self-indulgent and grossly overrated. I recognize it has given us some great performances — Bogart, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, say — as well as chiaroscuro lighting, laconic dialogue, cynical hard-bittenness and cancerously heroic quantities of smoking. But that’s exactly the problem. Film noir is so in love with its look and style, the plotting comes a very poor sixth. What, though, does any of this have to do with Perry Mason, the suave, brilliant, clean-cut lawyer played by Raymond Burr in the long-running Fifties and Sixties courtroom drama series? Well, bizarrely, HBO has decided to revive him for another of those dark and grimy origin stories that Joker made so fashionable.

You’re the director of one of the biggest blockbusters in recent memory. Your latest project premiers Fourth of July weekend: an American Revolution epic, headlined by one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars. What could go wrong? In 2000, Roland Emmerich did everything right with The Patriot. Robert Rodat, a veteran of Saving Private Ryan, wrote the script. The Smithsonian Institute consulted on historical accuracy. Mel Gibson, who had led the charge in Braveheart, was the star. He was also People’s ‘Sexiest Man Alive’. ‘The problem I have is people love me so much, they never criticize me,’ Gibson lamented in a cameo on The Simpsons in 1999. ‘It’s hell being Mel.’ Cinematic hell is where The Patriot remains.

‘You are so lucky that I don’t know your thing. Do you understand how lucky you are?’ comic Louis C.K. tells his comeback show audience. ‘Everybody knows my fucking thing, now. Obama knows my thing. Do you understand how that feels? To know that Obama was like “Good Lord!”’ It’s a good point well made. Everyone who knows anything about the world of comedy does indeed know Louis C.K.’s thing. In 2017, when #MeToo exploded, C.K. was ranked by Rolling Stone number four among the 50 best stand-up comics of all time. His sexual proclivity was publicly exposed, he lost numerous television deals and movie contracts and he suddenly found himself cast into outer darkness. All in all, it cost him an estimated $35 million in lost income.

In her new book, the singer-songwriter Tori Amos advises aspiring artists to be wary of those who would lead them astray. ‘Most people cannot raise their hand and say, “Your expression, your piece, your song, your art, is not to my taste; in fact I have an aversion to it, but I think it’s brilliant.” And that means that... some people judge something to be good or not good by what they personally like. Beware of this, I say to all artists.’ The simple sentiment encapsulates why so much creative potential is stifled before it can flourish. An artist whose principal goal is to please an imagined audience, or to adapt his or her work to critical trends, is no kind of artist at all.

I’m a Nineties kid. You know what that means: Tamagotchis, Super Mario, Sega, primitive cell phones, slap bracelets, skateboarding, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, David Koresh, scooters, Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls, the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the Nato bombing of Sarajevo, Pokémon!, Blink-182, Bill Clinton, Friends and the friends of Bill Clinton. What a decade! Only Nineties kids will understand it. And as even Nineties kids grow up, Nineties nostalgia is now big business. Everyone from the Spice Girls to Smashing Pumpkins has launched comeback tours on a rising tide of misty-eyed affection. McDonald’s brought back Tamagotchis and Furbys and other veteran Happy Meal toys. Friends is set to make a highly profitable return.

I have to laugh when I read about my Baby Boom cohort’s memories of savoring rock ’n’ roll behind the backs of disapproving elders. I had no such problem. I wasn’t especially taken with the new sounds of the Fifties: I was six years old when Elvis Presley debuted on the Ed Sullivan Show. I thought he was vaguely comical. In any case, my parents had resolutely high-minded middlebrow taste in such things, wavering somewhere between Dvorak, Lawrence Welk and Mozart. Rock ’n’ roll was simply out of the question. Everything else heard in the household — country and folk music, in particular, which my elder siblings’ favored — was tolerated to some degree, but my own secret musical vice was not.

On January 23, Dr Stephen D. O’Leary, a retired professor of communications at the University of Southern California, posted a poem by George Eliot to his Facebook page. It begins: ‘O May I join the choir invisible / Of those immortal dead who live again’. For 25 years Stephen was one of my closest friends in the world. I still can’t believe that I have to use the past tense when talking about him. He pressed ‘send’ on that Facebook post at 4:47 p.m. At one in the morning he joined the choir invisible. Although his heart attack was unexpected, we knew we were going to lose him. He called me the day after he was diagnosed with liver cancer. ‘I’m not afraid of dying. It’s going to be interesting,’ he said.

A true adaptation of David Copperfield is neither possible nor even desirable. It would last as long as it takes to read the novel, say, two weeks. The principal cast would number in the dozens, and the extras — the clerks, lawyers, policemen, landlords, cooks, chimney sweeps, pickpockets, sailors, ministers, soldiers, beggars, porters, carters, fishermen, coachmen, pimps, gypsies and whores — in the hundreds of thousands. Replicating the cellars, garrets, galleries, museums, bridges, pubs, factories, shipyards, docks, scaffolds and debtors’ prisons of Victorian London would require construction on a Himalayan scale.