Review of E. M. Gombrich's "The Story of Art"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Just a dozen or so pages into this book, I knew that it was one I wish I would have had access to when I was first seriously exposed to art. While in many respects, it is a conservative textbook (being first published in 1950), it is fundamentally meant for someone who has little to no previous formal contact with art history. Of course, if you have some, this can make you seriously engage some of your previously held assumptions about what you like and why you like it, but I got the distinct impression while reading that it was meant to initiate a teenager – a teenager who very much reminded of me of myself – into a whole new world. 

The inclusions and exclusions of certain artists are, of course, always arbitrary. However, Gombrich’s choices do not deviate too much from a standard art history text. What particularly drew me to the book was what I perceived to be its inordinate focus on medieval and especially Renaissance art. Of the twenty-eight chapters included in the book, about five mostly focus on Western medieval images (6 and 8-11). Another six chapters (13-18) focus on the art of the Western Renaissance. Most surveys of art history to which I had been previously exposed paid scant attention to medieval art and they sometimes did not give the Renaissance the space that I felt it deserved. There is no doubt the medieval and Renaissance art Gombrich’s pet periods here (and, admittedly, they’re mine, too.) 

What makes it so special is that, instead of spending the first chapter in an abstract exercise of thinking about what “Art” is, he forces you over and over again to take the art on its own terms. While discussing the various visual perspectives painted by the artist of “The Garden of Nebamun,” he says: “To us reliefs and wall-paintings provide an extraordinarily vivid picture of life as it was lived in Egypt thousands of years ago. And yet, looking at them for the first time, one may find them rather bewildering. The reason is that the Egyptian painters had a very different way from ours of representing real life. Perhaps this is connected with the different purpose their paintings had to serve. What mattered most was not prettiness but completeness. It was the artists’ task to preserve everything as clearly and permanently as possible. So they did not set out to sketch nature as it appeared to them from any fortuitous angle” (p. 60). It is the occasional insight like this that makes the book most worthwhile for a neophyte. After all, how many of us have measured something we saw by the standards of our particular narrow time and place? He really drives home the point that thinking about art seriously means thinking about other perspectives (both literally and figuratively), other preoccupations, and other aesthetic modus operandi. This is a lesson that should be lost on none of us, about art, or about anything else.

Review of Hans Keilsons' "Comedy in a Minor Key"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

The premise is simple enough. A married couple, Wim and Marie, decide to take in a Jew named Nico during World War II. In hiding him, the comfortably middle-class Wim and Marie learn what it means to live the precarious life of a Jew in 1940s Holland, in what would have otherwise been a set of rather ordinary circumstances. Soon afterwards, Nico becomes ill and eventually dies in their house, leaving the couple in the unique position of needing to dispose of a body no one can know they had there in the first place. They eventually leave him wrapped in blankets in a nearby park, but soon discover that they might have left a clue to their identity behind. Therefore, in a wonderful turn of irony, Wim and Marie are themselves forced to instantly flee their house for fear of being discovered by the police. 

The title is beautiful and wholly appropriate to the story. Juxtapositions are everywhere: there is the comic lightness of opera bouffe as Wim and Marie try to figure out how to get rid of Nico, but also the crushing dramatic realization of how this has all come about because of how some humans have chosen to treat others; the interplay of the quotidian as the couple go about their day-to-day existences in war-torn Holland with only the audience to find that this will one day be a place of grand historical importance. 

Writer Francine Prose recently wrote in a piece in the New York Times that she has come to include Dutch writer Hans Keilson in her personal list of the world’s “very greatest writers.” On that alone, I took up Keilson’s “Death of the Adversary,” and was just as impressed. Despite Time magazine’s listing it as one of the ten best magazines of the year, aside Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” and Porter’s “Ship of Fools,” Keilson unfortunately fell into obscurity in the English-speaking world. 

Translator Damion Searls’ revivification of his work is admirable and deserved, even while I found this “Comedy in a Minor Key” to be much less rewarding than “Death of the Adversary.” The former is a small, personal, intimate picture of human identity and frailty touchingly conceived, but it felt underdeveloped to me. Its size, at a mere 135 pages, gave me less time than I would have preferred to get to know Wim, Marie, and Nico. “Death of the Adversary,” however, deals with looming, world-historical forces that are at work in our lives, with bigger, abstracter ideas, and was probably for that reason more compelling for me. My rating of three stars here might be a little low. I didn’t know whether to go with three or four, but I can’t see myself rereading it any time soon, so I chose three. I would recommend to anyone interested in Keilson that they read “Death of the Adversary,” which I found to be truly spectacular.

Review of Fernando de Rojas' "Celestina"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

“Celestina” is one of those literary peculiarities that you might not have had the pleasure to be introduced to if you had not taken a course in Spanish literature. I first ran across the title in the Dedalus European Classics series, which has a lot of similarly obscure and wonderful things, including Georges Rodenbach and Gustav Meyrink. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that a more mainstream publisher like Penguin had the same translation, by Peter Bush.

Celestina, the local procuress and alchemic mage, makes a living off of restoring the hymens of previously deflowered young girls so that they may be marriageable again. The rich noble Calisto has fallen in love with Melibea, yet it is wholly unrequited. He enlists Celestina to fix this, and through some crafty manipulation she eventually succeeds. Two of Calisto’s servants, Parmeno and Sempronio, promise to offer their own services to Celestina if she will split Calisto’s payment three ways. Parmeno starts out being honest, telling Calisto that Celestina is nothing but a money-hungry crook, but eventually gives up when he sees how hopelessly in love Calisto really is. Once Celestina refuses to pay them, everything starts to go horribly, horribly downhill. What read for the first two-thirds as a bawdy comedy turns into a bloodbath on par with “Hamlet.” The label tragicomedy seems especially appropriate here, having equal measures of both.

The plot is fast-paced and easy to follow. It is divided into twenty-one short, heavily dialogue-driven chapters that read very much like a play (even though it was apparently never mean to be staged). Throughout, the best advice is given through numbing, stultifying bromides, and this is especially true of Celestina. You can almost open the book randomly and find clichés, though the humor of the characters still manages to jump off the page.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote a beautiful description of Celestina in “The Coming of Age.” She wrote, “This was the first time that an old woman had appeared as the main heroine; in the traditional way she was of course a bawd, but a bawd of dimensions quite unlike those of any character who had yet been produced. She was a former whore who had stayed in the trade because she liked it, a self-seeking, lewd, and intriguing old woman, and something of a witch as well – the leading, most active character in the play [though play, as I noted above, is not the right word for this piece]. In her are summed up all the vices that had been attributed to the old women since classical times, and in spite of all her shrewdness she ends by being severely punished. The French theatre turned to this source of inspiration, but with less striking results: we find old bawds and prostitutes in Jodelle, Odet de Turnebe, and Larivey.”

The reader gets the feeling that, when it was first published at the very end of the fifteenth century, “Celestina” was meant first and foremost to be a savage critique of the reigning morality of the time. While it has lost its critical punch, it is still full of characters, ideas, and bawdy that make it enjoyable, humane, and lovable. Since it was written before most modern-day genres had the chance to fully gel, the style takes getting used to; it cannot be easily pegged down, like we do more easily with Cervantes and Shakespeare, who in theme and style and both heavily foreshadowed here (especially the former).

I can’t read Spanish, so I can’t comment on the original. However, I can recommend Peter Bush’s translation to anyone who is looking for a unique reading experience far off the beaten path.

Review of E. P. Thompson's "The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

E. P. Thompson, perhaps best known for his “The Making of the English Working Class,” and his posthumous book-length treatment of the poetry of William Blake titled “Witness Against the Beast,” planned a comprehensive – and possibly multi-volume - treatment of English Romantic poetry. Unfortunately, he only got a chance to sketch the plan for the project before he passed away in 1993. This volume, “The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age,” then represents not Thompson’s complete vision, or even anything close to it, but is rather a compilation of some preliminary ideas collected by Thompson’s wife (a fine historian in her own right, but not of the English Romantics), which constitute about one-fourth of the material of the book. The rest consists of extended book reviews that, while integrating a lot of the relevant history that certainly would have been included in Thompson’s completed book, fail to contribute to the overarching thesis that Thompson seemed to set out in the first couple of essays. 

The weakest parts of the book were the reviews, which were really tied together by nothing other than the fact that they concerned the figures involved in the lives of either Coleridge or Wordsworth, and influenced their ideas about and reactions to the French Revolution. William Godwin and John Thelwall are two of the most prominent of these figures, who are of no small amount of historical interest. However, I would imagine that the average reader of this book would not likely be interested in reading Mark Philp’s seven-volume edition of the “Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin,” and might feel genuinely miffed that reviews like these make up the majority of the book. To make matters worse, the words “book review” are mentioned nowhere on the inside flaps or back cover of the book.

But there are a couple of pieces that save this book from being completely uninteresting to the average reader. The first piece, “Education and Experience,” is a convincing if somewhat truncated argument asserting that Wordsworth’s poetry tried to bridge the gap between the educated gentry and the common man, elevating pure experience as the true metric of education. Thompson argues that education prior to the 1790s was practically synonymous with social control, and that a so-called classroom of experience could be liberating. Of course we recognize this viewpoint now as one of the cynosures of Romantic thought, but it was radically new in the last decade of the eighteenth century.

In the second piece, “Disenchantment or Default?,” Thompson discusses the role of what he calls disenchantment (being critical of former positions, politics, and opinions generally) versus apostasy (the total and utter disavowal of said positions). He says that disenchantment can enhance poetry, while the completeness of apostasy ruins it, often turning the poet into a cynic, which is what I take it to mean when he says, “There is a tension between a boundless aspiration – for liberty, reason, egalite, perfectibility – and a peculiarly harsh and unregenerate reality. So long as that tension persists, the creative impulse can be felt. But once the tension slackens, the creative impulse fails also.” Thompson insinuates that this might have happened to Wordsworth, and that it certainly happened to Coleridge. The title of the last piece, “Hunting the Jacobin Fox,” refers to the political radical John Thelwall and his relationships with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and their subsequent repudiation of his political positions. 

During the years leading up to his death, Thompson was passionately involved in worldwide nuclear disarmament. I suppose some of us think that the eradication of atomic weapons is more important than 1790s England. While I too share this sentiment, I secretly found myself wishing that he would have used the down time between delivering polemics against Reagan’s Star Wars program to sketch some crib notes on our beloved Lake Poets.

Review of Edward Lucie-Smith's "Movements in Art Since 1945"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Many non-fiction genres sometimes find it difficult to navigate between two audiences: the rank neophytes who need a basic grounding in the topic at hand, and those who already have a thorough knowledge of those fundamentals. It is those of us who are in the middle who sometimes have difficulty finding the right book for them. Edward Lucie-Smith provides some of those big, overarching ideas that are essential for those building on the basics, but the sheer number of painters and sculptors that he throws at the reader is a little disorienting, especially when you’re still trying to discern what ties Morris Louis, Frank Stella, and Helen Frankenthaler all under the category of “post-painterly abstraction.” Maybe it’s just my compulsion to over-categorize and draw connections between all the artists that detracted from the book.

The introduction to the book was really promising, and draws a lot of lines of continuity between the art of pre- and post-World War II. Lucie-Smith argues, for example, that whereas it is often thought that Modernism came to some sort of end not long after this time, the techniques, aesthetics, and materials used to make the art never changed, and therefore this art remained, in many ways, Modernist. The first few pages of each chapter also give some great intellectual background to each of the major movements, i.e., abstract expressionism, post-painterly abstraction, p/op art, and photorealism. But after this, the reader is met with page after page of artists who appear quickly and just as quickly disappear never to be heard from or seen again, with usually just one painting or sculpture to represent an entire artist’s oeuvre. Well-known artists like Henry Moore and Frank Stella get two photographic plates, and no one gets more than that. Quickly afterward, I got lost in a welter of names with which I was barely familiar or not familiar at all. What I appreciated most about this book is that I was introduced to many new names that I didn’t know before, and now know to keep an eye out for them.

Review of Peter Handke's "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

In this novel, “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick,” Peter Handke puts on full display the self-conscious experimentation for which he has become so well-known over the last four decades. This is Handke’s third novel (originally published in Germany in 1970), and his first to be translated into English in 1972. Because of its length – only 130 pages – I would suggest this as a good starting place for those who think they might be interested in the voice of Handke’s early fiction.

While the plot is perhaps not the most important aspect of the book, a précis is appropriate. Bloch, a construction worker, is laid off in the first sentence of the book. In a kind of heightened euphoria, Bloch checks into a hotel with only a suitcase, occasionally leaving to visit the cinema. He notices a young woman there, and spends the night with her. For some reason, or perhaps for no reason at all, Bloch murders her in her apartment. Emotion, motive, and fury are all completely excised from the tone of the novel, even in relation to this act. The reader never learns if Bloch is exhilarated or ashamed or scared of being caught. Shortly afterwards, he leaves for a small town on the Austrian border where still more events occur that should faze him, but they never seem to. The last few pages shed light on the meaning of the title is a way that is simply too good to divulge here.

Handke uses some brilliant social critique, especially on the subjects of consumerism and the meaningless of small talk shared with strangers. At one point, he is sitting in a café with two young women. “We buy all our dressed ready-made,” one tells him. “We do each other’s hair.” “In the summer it’s usually getting light by the time we finally get home.” “I prefer the slow dances.” “On the trip home we don’t joke around as much anymore, then we forget about talking.” Handke deftly communicates the crushing smallness of people. Another time, Bloch compulsively asks what everything is worth, including the furniture in his hotel room, as if fascinated and compelled by the idea that money could be the sole metric of worth. To borrow the argot of Tonnies, a sense of decadence – the fall from a traditional Gemeinschaft to a post-industrial Gesellschaft suffuses the novel, wherein old ways of communicating, emoting, and going about our day-to-day lives have been radically reconfigured. While I don’t read German, I have the feeling that the translator, Michael Roloff, had a big part in achieving these effects, too.

The most engaging part of the novel, at least for me, was its experimental style. Of course, depending on personal preferences, some might find it the most frustrating. Handke writes in flat, declarative, staccato sentences, which has the odd effect of spreading Bloch’s emotional numbness to even the reader. The novel focuses in on language to show its strengths, but also its glaring flaws. You get the feeling that Handke has quarried the words for his novella over a period of months or years, never with the naïve assumption that they could ever be ready-made tools for our passive use. In doing so, he issues forth a thoroughly invigorating critique of language and language use. It was akin to reading Wittgenstein, had he written fiction. 

All in all, it was not a wholly unpleasurable experience, even if it was more experimental than most fiction that I do read. However, I appreciated this novel more than I enjoyed it. Handke certainly does bring a lot to the table as far as questioning what fiction does, how it’s performed, and what it can do for us. If you like your fiction to delve into these questions, you might find this highly enjoyable. If not, and you haven’t read anything by him, you may want to read this anyway: it’s short, and Handke has often been called one of the greatest living writers in the German language. 

Review of Jay Winter's "Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

“My Peter, I intend to try to be faithful … What does that mean? To love my country in my own way as you loved it in your way. And to make this love work. To look at the young people and be faithful to them. Besides that I shall do my work, the same work, my child, which you were denied. I want to honor God in my work, too, which means I want to be honest, true and sincere … When I try to be like that, dear Peter, I ask you then to be around me, help me, show yourself to me. I know you are there, but I see you only vaguely, as if you were shrouded in mist. Stay with me…” – Kathe Kollwitz (artist), in a letter to her son Peter, who was killed in WWI

This excerpt from a letter by Kathe Kollwitz, whose heartbreaking sculpture and prints encapsulated the loss of an entire generation, also addresses some of the concerns at the heart of Jay Winter’s “Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning,” which explores intellectual territory already trodden by the likes of Paul Fussell in his “The Great War and Modern Memory” and George Mosse in his “Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars” (which I reviewed for this site in January.) Unlike Mosse’s book, which looks at larger national and cultural factors, Winter hones in on how people coped with tragedy on a level unknown until the trench warfare of World War I. In the second half of the book, he looks at different artistic media – film, popular art, novels, and poetry – in an attempt to distill how they dealt differently with the loss, guilt, and trauma that was visited upon them by the War.

We often think that the soldiers who fell in the War as Americans or Europeans, but of course some were from as far away as Australia. Winter argues that this affects the way even the most fundamental ways we relate to the War, especially the way that we mourn. He tells the story of Australian Vera Deakin (daughter of the pre-War Prime Minister Alfred Deakin), who was one of the most active members of the Australian Red Cross and searched endlessly for missing and unidentified soldiers. Families in Western Europe (where Winter spends most of his time in the book) read of their losses within days for the most part, but it sometimes took weeks or even months for those in Australia. Worse yet, some simply heard nothing more than that their loved one was “missing in action,” and many never heard anything at all. 

Culturally and aesthetically, we think of World War I as being the cynosure of modernism. However, Winter argues that in order to grieve, Europeans looked backward instead of forward. Spiritualism saw a huge resurgence during the War years. It was just one of the “powerfully conservative effects of the Great War on one aspect of European cultural history.” Instead of a burgeoning modernism, these years were much more dominated by Victorian sentimentalism and traditional religious and spiritual ideas. 

The second half of the book turns toward the arts for clearer insight on how grieving occurred, on both personal and national levels. One of the most interesting parts here is Winter’s short history of Images d’Epinal, a tradition of popular, often kitschy, French folk art that was very popular at the time, and often catered to aforementioned Victorian ideals and religious feelings. Again, the focus is on realism and the representationalism of the past, not the avant-garde. Winter ends by jumping all the way to World War II and noting how the grammar of mourning had changed in the wake of the Shoah. To quote Adorno, “It is barbarism to write poetry after Auschwitz.” Not long afterward, we start seeing the rise of even more self-consciously abstract and anti-representational in all different kinds of cultural expression. It would seem that much of the art world at the time agreed with Adorno’s appraisal. 

In the end, this book was not merely as good as the Mosse, which struck me as brilliant and well-argued. Nevertheless, Winter’s revisionist cultural history of World War I being a time of aesthetic conservatism and tradition is one worth considering; there is certainly enough evidence to both support and refute it. I plan on reading his “Remembering the War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century” soon.