Books to the Ceiling

Thursday night April 10, I took my friend Helene, a balletomane like myself, to New York City Center to see the Kirov work its magic. The program consisted of scenes from four different ballets: Le Corsaire, Diana and Acteon, Don Quixote, and La Bayadere.

How was it? Superlatives fail me. I don’t have the words, but the poets do. I keeping thinking of two passages in particular:: Romeo’s astonished declaration that “I ne’er saw true beauty till this night;” and the final lines of one of my favorite poems, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn:” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — That is all / Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.” Here’s the entire poem:

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter, therefore, ye soft pipes, play on,
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never, canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping song for ever new,
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

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As a meditation on the age-old desire to stop cruel time in its tracks, this work, for me, has no equal. I wished very powerfully that the performance we saw that night could be frozen in time, like “the marble men and maidens overwrought” on Keats’s vase. But I will cherish the memory. And there are pictures…

The corps de ballet in the exquisite La Bayadere.

Soloists in La Bayadere

Leonid Sarafanov, whose spectacular leaps and light-as-a-feather landings repeatedly thrilled the audience.* (Here’s a “head shot” of the astounding Sarafanov taken last year. Doesn’t he look as though he’s all of fourteen years old?!)

This photo of Diana Vishneva, taken by Andrea Mohin, appeared in the New York Times on Sunday April 13:

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The music, by turns robust and delicate, was played beautifully by the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre; most of the choreography was done by the great Marius Petipa. Helene and I gazed at the program in awe - such storied names…

Here is the Mariinsky Theatre’s official site. It is very oriented to the here and now - not much in the way of history, except for the acknowledgement, in tiny print, that this is there 225th season. For some interesting background, and great photos of the theater itself, see the Wikipedia entry.

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For a fascinating cultural hisory of Russia, see Natasha’s Dance by Orlando Figes. (I won’t claim to have read through this massive tome; I’ve been using it primarily as a reference work since I purchased it several years ago.)

*For more terrific portraits of ballet dancers, see Gene Schiavone’s site.

So I had returned to my hotel in the late afternoon, after an intense several hours spent at the Metropolitan Museum Art. It had been one epiphany after another: the fabulous Courbet exhibit, followed by the equally fabulous Poussin exhibit - I went through both of them twice - lunch with Helene, one of my dearest and closest friends - a quick walk through the mysteries and beauties of the Asian wing, and finally, a taxi ride back, through the noisy, pungent chaos of the streets of New York. (Please, please institute congestion pricing, Mayor Bloomberg - sooner rather than later. Whence comes the perverse sense of entitlement that impels people to bring their vehicles into a city with such a comprehensive system of mass transit?)

Anyway - as I said, I’m back at my hotel. It’s about five o’clock and my head aches, as do my feet, and I feel grimy and exhausted…ah, New York, playground of my youth, do I need any better proof that I have left that youth far behind me? But wait..WAIT!! The headache abates, the energy flows back, the spring returns to my step.. and lo! I am getting a second wind!

Out I go again, bending my steps toward the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. But before I get there, I hear the siren song, and I am seduced, utterly vanquished…by Bergdorf Goodman’s justly famous display windows!

Bergdorf’s has had a presence on Fifth Ave. and 58th for as long as I can remember. But somehow, it seems to have grown exponentially.

Well, I couldn’t resist: I went inside. And Lo! I was greeted with blazing light, and bags and jewelry and more bags and more jewelry. And so, seeking to establish my bona fides as a smart, sophisticated shopper whose resources, while not exactly unlimited, are not paltry, either, I saunter over to one of the jewelry counters and announce: “I need gold earrings to wear to my son’s wedding in June.” (Aha! I finally found the ideal placement for that incredibly important nugget of info!)

“Oh, here’s a very nice pair, and they’re nicely priced, too,” says the saleswoman - oops, sorry, the sales associate - as she pulls out a nice, decidedly unremarkable pair of gold earrings. “How much?” I ask. The response: “Two thousand -” Please pardon the dash. I never heard the rest. And speaking of dashes, I performed one then and there, right out of that department! I fared no better with the bags, repeatedly encountering four numbers to the left of the decimal point.

Here, for instance, is one of the famous, fabulous Leiber bags. I do love it, but for $3,695.00 ?? Alas, I think not… And so I passed dolefully from the premises. So much for the Sophisticated Shopper!

Farewell, O Temple of High End Consumerism! Now we’re off to MOMA!!

I was eight years old when my mother first took me to this museum. It was then, like me, ever so much smaller. I recall walking up a winding staircasee and finding myself in a room with two paintings by Henri Rousseau, “Le Douanier”: The Dream and The Sleeping Gypsy. For almost my whole life I have carried their images with me in my mind’s eye. So…I wonder..Where are they now?

MoMa has become HUGE!! The lobby alone is a vast, echoing space. Lucky, too, because it was wall to wall people - noisy, crowded, and very festive. This was probably at least partly due to the fact that it was a “Target Free Friday Night,” meaning that admission is free on Friday evenings from four until closing at eight. (As a rule, I’m no fan of big box stores, but I really admire Target’s numerous philanthropic initiatives.)

I go up the main staircase - walking over a delightfully colorful installation - and no, it was not a mistake; it’s on the floor! - and instead of Rousseau’s two dreamy paintings, I see an object that resembles a table fan swinging crazily from the ceiling some six floors above. I would say it was a pendulum, except that it kept changing direction. At its lowest point, it was about ten feet from the floor; when it came toward you, you ducked instinctively, even though there was no danger. There was something inexplicably exhilarating about this installation; I laughed out loud and so did many others around me. Is it art? Well, you could debate that question. Is it fun? Definitely! (Something else that’s fun, and very cleverly executed, is the online exhibition “Color Chart.”)

For whatever reason, I was not able to find the swinging fan on the MoMa site; neither could I find its name in the atrium where it swung so merrily. I believe it’s called Ventilator and that it is by Olafur Eliasson, who is described in Wikipedia as a Danish/Icelandic artist. Eliasson recently had an exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Art called “Take Your Time.” Here’s the Ventilator as it was seen there, where they apparently had it installed in the lobby of the museum.

There were many other objects of interest in the second floor. (Notice my reluctance to term them “art works.”) Some were intriguing; others seemed simply bizarre. But in this temple to the modern and the postmodern, I found one work with roots that go back thousands of years. I stood before it dumbstruck, with a very strong sensation that I was destined to be standing there in front of it. It is called “Crowhurst;” the image, created by artist Tacita Dean , depicts a yew tree in Surry, in South East England, that is thought to be four thousand years old.

Dean has said that she was fascinated by this ancient tree and also drawn to its name because of the story of Donald Crowhurst. Crowhurst participated in a round-the-world yacht race in 1968. His craft, a trimaran, was found adrift; he himself was nowhere to be found. The mystery of his disappearance has never been solved, although current thinking apparently holds that he committed suicide.

I read The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst when it was first published in 1970, and I have never forgotten this strange, disturbing story. (Neither apparently have many others; see the section on “Literary and dramatic treatment” in the Wickipedia entry.)

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After standing for some time before Tacita Dean’s stunning work, I roused myself and headed up to the fifth floor. There, I had been assured, is where I would find my old friends. And, sure enough, there they were…

The Bather, by Paul Cezanne

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Bird in Space, by Constantin Brancusi

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Picasso’s revolutionary Demoiselles D’Avignon

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The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dali

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Van Gogh’s Starry Night

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Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure), by Giorgio De Chirico

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Broadway Boogie Woogie, by Piet Mondrian (Years ago I owned a dress whose print pattern looked alot like this painting!)

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I and the Village, by Marc Chagall

There are many, many more. But I must reserve a place apart for the paintings by Henri Rousseau, as they are so dear to me:

The Sleeping Gypsy; and below, The Dream

I have to say that I’m somewhat disappointed as to the current placement of these works. The Sleeping Gypsy was hung rather unimaginatively on a plain white wall in the middle of numerous other works, some interesting, some not. And The Dream, inexplicably placed alone on a wall near the cafeteria, is now behind glass. While this insures that catsup won’t be inadvertently sprayed on it, the resulting glare makes for difficult viewing.

Possibly due to my (mild) annoyance concerning the above situation, I was especially delighted, when I later got around to reading that day’s New York Times, to find a delicious tale of irreverence entitled, “At the Modern, Art in a New York Minute.”

Nicholas Poussin lived from 1594 to 1665. Although French by birth, he spent most of his creative life in Rome. Read more about his life and art at one of my favorite online destinations, the Web Gallery of Art.

Enter “Nicholas Poussin and Nature” and you enter another world. Strange myths and stories from the Bible come to life; they are set against a backdrop of fabulous trees and sky and monumental structures from antique lands that may, or may not, have once existed.

In the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition, Pierre Rosenberg, in his essay “Encountering Poussin,” quotes the following from an essay by Jacques de Cambry that was first published in 1783:

‘All the Landscapes of this great Man [Poussin] have a character of majesty that is all his own: always simple, he does not divert himself by seeking and assembling so many small effects of light, by drawing small jets of water, little waterfalls; all the riches of Egyptian and Greek Architecture, all the tranquil and sublime beauties of Nature are transposed into his paintings. Always there is an interesting Episode that speaks to the soul, that indicates the emotion that the Viewer should experience; it is Diogenes in the outskirts of Athens, breaking a useless cup, after seeing a young man drink from the hollow of his hand. It is Saint John, amid the ruins and ravages of time, writing the Gospel. It is an old man under a leafy tree, giving himself up to philosophical reflections, after having hung up the arms and the lyre of his youth, in the tree that lends him its shade.’

And now, feast your eyes…

Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice. She’s about to receive a fatal snake bite, poor thing, but Orpheus, her oblivious lover, just keeps singing and playing.

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Landscape with Diogenes

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Landscape with St. John on Patmos

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Summer, or Ruth and Boaz

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Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun

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And finally, a painting long known to me but never actually seen until now:

The Arcadian shepherds, or Et in Arcadia Ego

Arcadia represents a place of pastoral beauty and peace. The phrase “Et in Arcadia Ego” has been taken to mean “Even in Arcadia, I - meaning Death - am here.” It is what is called a memento mori, a reminder of inevitable death. As in “The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard; also “In the midst of life we be in death” from The Book of Common Prayer.

The “Met” currently features special exhibitions on two extraordinary French painters: Gustave Courbet and Nicholas Poussin. I went to see the Courbets first. I had read an article in the Washington Post by Blake Gopnik, on whose discernment in such matters I depend; he described the exhibit as “jaw-dropping.” It is.

Born in 1819 in the village of Ornans in the Franch-Comte, a region in the north east of France, Courbet came to Paris to paint in 1840. He immediately set about smashing icons and in the process infuriating the critics, a staid and stuffy lot, from all appearances. He lived large, becoming quite large himself in the process.

Courbet painted everything from portraits (including quite a few of himself), landscapes, seascapes, hunting scenes, and nudes ( some just this side of pornographic) with a breathtaking combination of abandon and precision. To wit:

The Young Ladies of the Village

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The Desperate Man

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Woman with a Parrot

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The Wounded Man

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The Meeting or Bonjour, Monsiuer Courbet

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River Landscape

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Flowers

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The Stormy Sea or The Wave

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Chateau de Chillon [Yes - This is the same Chillon that inspired Lord Byron's two poems, "Sonnet on Chillon" and "The Prisoner of Chillon." The latter is a narrative poem of great power. See the final stanza below*]

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In his later years, Courbet became involved in politics - defiantly and disastrously - and joined the short-lived Paris Commune in 1871. Having survived six months in prison, he was then forced into exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1877.

While at the Met, I purchased the DVD entitled Gustave Courbet, made in France last year (possibly in conjunction with the exhibit at the Musee D’Orsay. See Jonathan Jones’s eloquent review in The Guardian.) We watched it last night. It is beautifully done.

Among other things, we see in this film  lovely views of Ornans, which appear essentially unchanged since Courbet’s time. Something to be thankful for, in addtion to an astounding body of work by this genius painter.

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*Final stanza of “The Prisoner of Chillon,” by George Gordon, Lord Byron:

It might be months, or years, or days–
I kept no count, I took no note,
I had no hope my eyes to raise,
And clear them of their dreary mote.
At last men came to set me free;
I ask’d not why, and reck’d not where,
It was at length the same to me,
Fetter’d or fetterless to be,
I learn’d to love despair.
And thus when they appear’d at last,
And all my bonds aside were cast,
These heavy walls to me had grown
A hermitage–and all my own!
And half I felt as they were come
To tear me from a second home:
With spiders I had friendship made,
And watch’d them in their sullen trade,
Had seen the mice by moonlight play,
And why should I feel less than they?
We were all inmates of one place,
And I, the monarch of each race,
Had power to kill–yet, strange to tell!
In quiet we had learn’d to dwell–
My very chains and I grew friends,
So much a long communion tends
To make us what we are:–even I
Regain’d my freedom with a sigh.