12. Cat’s Cradles: Art Exhibitions Reviewed by Pippa Hammet.
When you construct a proper cat’s cradle, you really need two people (four hands), so I asked Master Raro to accompany me to two exhibitions here in Manhattan: the Lincoln Kirstein show at MoMA and The Young and the Evil exhibit at the David Zwirner Gallery (533 West 19th Street). As a trained dancer, Master was interested in the ballet components of the shows, and I, of course, am fascinated by the Parker Tyler-Pavel Tchelichew-Sergei Eisenstein connections. As you may or may not know, Kirstein was a cat-lover, like our beloved boss, Louise Ebersdorf.
At the Ebersdorf Tower, the contractors are tearing up the 35th floor to create a dance studio out of a rec-room, and Louise’s twenty-two resident cats are going crazy with all the noise, so Albertine and Paco (expert cat-wranglers) have their hands full. (It looks like our Louise has interested a young choreographer, Cheryl S., in making a video with former dancers A&P.) Master thinks the amplified nocturnal purring that the solo tomcat Murr provides for Louise may indeed be influencing her health, but just how remains to be seen. She definitely sleeps soundly now. Louise not only has me reading her to sleep every night but also supervising her correspondence with our State Department and the Xinjiang government in Greater China (just try reaching Ürümqi by email, I dare you, especially now that the Italians have joined the One Belt, One Road plan).
But get this: Master and I have received the confidential report from a private investigative office in Paris (Agence Constantine), which has been checking out the backgrounds of Albertine and Paco. It has traced Albertine to medieval ancestry in French Bayonne, a family that went by the surname Desmarais. The line contained religious leaders and (get ready) conjurers and witches who figured in the Inquisition of the 17th century. (The report found no evidence of such practices in today’s Bayonne.) The investigators have thrown up their hands before Paco’s background, at least until Louise provides more information and Euros. (Paco just is very mysterious.) Master and I have not informed Louise of the agency’s findings as yet. We can cushion her from the real world only so long at a time. We will find the right opportunity for full disclosure. I myself am curiously unmoved by these new revelations, but I can tell Master is retro-extrapolating. He keeps muttering something about “feathers and string”.
Off we went to MoMA. Lincoln Kirstein is a mystery, too, perhaps self-made. All one can guess about his life’s trajectory from the MoMA exhibition is that he allowed himself to be stirred to patronage by a number of the 20th century’s more refined artistic enterprises, whether in ballet, theater, agitprop, design, motion pictures or still photography. His aesthetic predilections were so oriented toward form and style (especially from exemplars of Renaissance and Baroque art) that subject matter is almost rendered superfluous. (There is a residual emphasis on figuration, especially the nude male body.) The current exhibition is large and covers a number of rooms, with paintings, sculpture, photographic prints, projected films, everything but architectural models. It leaves you feeling that Kirstein’s exquisite focus was more than a little enervating and his range of interests finally exhausting. (Master and I recommend more than one viewing of the show to avoid the fatigue factor.) The Modern’s relation to Kirstein may have been too wide-spread and his life-long curiosities finally too narrowly maintained, the exception being his sponsorship of the great George Balanchine, the School of American Ballet, and the New York City Ballet. That accomplishment alone would be enough to secure him a place in the history books.
There is also a sense that, except for his work for the ballet, this patron’s interest in the world around him may have constricted after his experiences in World War II. (I’ve noticed that service in the armed forces has a tendency to curtail mid-life curiosities.) In Kirstein’s own writings, historical models and artistic provenance claim priority, but when it comes to specific analysis, a self-congratulatory Great Silence was imposed. It was implied that too close an examination of a work is tantamount to vulgarism. I can appreciate the need to protect the unique imaginative spirit of the individual artwork from over-interpretation, but as soon as you talk about a ballet or a painting you are already interpreting it because you are choosing terms and/or sometimes employing new categories for discussion. In his essays and books, some of Kirstein’s circuitous language feels genteelly evasive, reflexively contrarian, and anti-intellectual. The result is to discourage serious critical dialogue. Not so good for the immediate and future talent in the room.
It is always reassuring to see the Walker Evans’ photographs of American frame houses, churches, streets and store fronts, especially in vintage prints taken out of MoMA’s storage and exhibited under good lighting. (I always think of James Agee’s socially conscious collaboration with Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – but that’s my film background at work.) Kirstein presumably helped find the subjects for Evans’ camera, so in a way this series was a collaboration. And the show climaxes with a projection of out-takes from Sergei Eisenstein’s Que viva México!, which the filmmaker screened for Kirstein when funds ran out and the director returned to Russia, leaving the huge project unfinished. Presumably Kirstein’s one regret at the end of his life was that he had not done more work in motion picture production. The excerpts on display allow one to appreciate shimmering details in Eduard Tisse’s cinematography.
Master Raro was happy to see the silent 16mm footage of a rehearsal for the earliest version of Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments from the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library’s Dance Collection. The camera catches the very young Tanaquil Le Clercq as Choleric and the original Melancholic of a gymnastic William Dollar. Master says that Balanchine revised some of the material later. (The original Sanguinic was Mary Ellen Moylan. Master missed Todd Bolender as Phlegmatic. No footage?) We get to see the original ending of the ballet (the convulsive Atomic Mushroom Cloud) with Melancholic repeatedly lifted aloft in the center of a circling ensemble. For some reason the video transfer of the films has reversed the images, so entrances on the left here appear on the right. On another MoMA screen there are silent clips from the repertory of Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan. The contrast between Kirstein’s concept of Americana ballet and Balanchine’s poetic vision could not be more pronounced. Did Kirstein ever register the difference, then or later? Balanchine’s inventions refer to a wide world beyond the ballet. Kirstein’s feel trapped in a period style. A new book by James Steichen (Balanchine and Kirstein’s American Enterprise, Oxford University Press) suggests there was not much substantive communication between the two, then or later. I see that a “performance studio” will be included in the galleries of the “new MoMA” opening in October of this year, so perhaps more dance will be coming to 53rd Street.
I was gratified to see Tchelichew’s Cache-Cache restored to the walls of MoMA after years in storage. (Couldn’t the great Phenomenon be loaned from Moscow?) This time I looked carefully at the small preliminary studies. Some of their details are especially luminous – for example, the variety of Leaf Children. What I think viewers have always loved about this masterwork is its merging of modern science and the mystical. Russian art has a way of cloaking the full implication of a metaphysical statement in a surface of realistic detail – thus, the perceptual game here of hide-and-seek. Kirstein was sometimes drawn to artists whose works evidence a mystical element (Tchelichew, Balanchine, Stravinsky). I wish this painting could be on permanent display at MoMA. In private, Kirstein appears to have lost his favorite Tchelichew to the artist-poet Charles Henri Ford (brother of the actress Ruth Ford). I must return to Parker Tyler’s vast study, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelichew for the story of that misalliance.
Off Master and I went to West 19th Street. At the David Zwirner Gallery, Ford and Tyler are memorialized in an exhibition entitled “The Young and the Evil,” named after a 1933 novel they co-authored about two young men who explore the gay milieu of Harlem and Greenwich Village. The show (curated by Jarrett Earnest and running until April 13) features works by Lincoln Kirstein’s colleagues and loves: Tchelichew, Ford, Paul Cadmus, Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein, Jared French, Margaret Hoening French, George Platt Lynes, Bernard Perlin, George Tooker, and Jensen Yow. I was pleased to see more of Tchelichew’s series of Interior Landscapes, but the exhibition is so oriented toward the sexual communality of the Kirstein crowd that the effect is more claustral than liberating, more doctrinaire than erotic.
If the MoMA exhibit is like a series of department store showrooms (“Eighth Floor – Collectible Curios!”), the Zwirner mimics something like the exclusive back rooms of 1940s Manhattan art galleries offering fetish canvasses and prints for clients with “special tastes”. Two of the Zwirner vitrines are dedicated to officially pornographic works by Kirstein’s confreres, including several commissioned by the Kinsey Institute of Indiana University and denied to public view until now. (The Kirsteinian-Kinsey connection was facilitated in the late 1940s by Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott.) If you have seen Jean Cocteau’s elegant versions of hand-drawn erotica, the Kinsey materials may be disappointing. Cocteau had his background in Minoan and Pompeiian erotic art – free, fantastic, full-bodied pagan renderings. The Zwirner examples feel cramped and dutiful in comparison, lacking in artistic passion. (So much for sexology.) Except for certain ballet photographs, the work of George Platt Lynes now can seem evasive and even euphemistic. Master says that Kirstein told friends privately that he himself avoided writing about sex because it was too easy to render the experience in “sordid” detail. (So much for sex.) Cocteau had a sense of humor. Where was that gift among these self-conscious New Yorkers?
Master tells me that Kirstein suffered from bi-polar disorder for much of his life, with the hyperactivity and paranoia that the condition imposes on its victims. Could Ben Hecht’s film The Specter of the Rose have been an earnest attempt to portray the incidence of bi-polarity around the theater and ballet crowd during the 1930s and 1940s? The movie is a stylistic hodgepodge and tonally incoherent, but it may be a halting study of an observable psychological phenomenon. (Goodness knows the condition continues among males in the arts in our world of 2019. Ask any female here in New York.) What we need now is a complete edition of Kirstein’s surviving letters and journals. From the evidence of excerpts which Master and I have read, he can be witty and moving in those writings. When one realizes what Kirstein endured to accomplish his work, all you can offer his shade is a line from one of Compton-Burnett’s characters: “Possess your soul in peace.”
Master and I recommend two of the films in the Lincoln Kirstein series coming up at MoMA in April parallel to the exhibition: Roy Del Ruth’s 1931 Blonde Crazy with James Cagney and Joan Blondell (April 12) and Del Ruth’s 1932 Taxi! with Cagney and Loretta Young (April 13). I wish I could recommend the MoMA exhibition’s catalogue accompanying the show. It is once-over-lightly in its text, and famous photographs are not well reproduced.
Paco informed Master over the weekend that my admirer, the tomcat Murr, wants to be near me during the studio reconstruction down below. I have complied. Murr now occupies my dressing table at night at the foot of my bed. No purring. The odd thing is that Murr doesn’t sleep. He sits, tail curled around his hindquarters, staring at me as I fall asleep following our dual ministrations for Louise -- his purrs, my readings. When I wake up during the night, Murr is still sitting there, at attention, green eyes glowing in the dark. It reminds me of that scene at the end of Murnau’s Nosferatu, where the heroine Ellen is watched through the window by the persistent Count Orlok. Is Murr my guard? For whom? From what? Greater love hath no cat?
P.H.
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