A Double Life: Frank O’Hara’s Amazing Versatility

(Bloomsbury Books.)

“Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.”

--Frank O’Hara

Matthew Holman’s exhaustively researched and methodically written book, Frank O’Hara: New York Poet, Global Curator, manages to be not only a superlative biography of this gifted poet but also a revealing memoir of the heady times in which he lived, a detailed chronicle of the city he so loved, and a tender portrait of the important Museum of Modern Art that many people, myself included at first, did not realize counted him among its most effective ambassadors of contemporary visual art. This is the first book to closely examine the curatorial work that O’Hara undertook for MOMA in New York and abroad. The day after his premature death in 1966, The New York Times ran an ironic and slightly ambiguous headline: “Frank O’Hara, 40, Museum Curator/Exhibitions Aide at Museum of Modern Art Dies – also a poet.” Also a poet? That strikes some of us as a surprise, since we felt it might well have read “Frank O’Hara, 40, NY poet dies—also a curator.”

Molière & Menotti

Clockwise from left: Amber Gray, Matthew Broderick, and David Cross in Tartuffe. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin.)

As Tartuffe, the titular character of Molière’s most famous comedy, Matthew Broderick is so preternaturally calm that he barely seems to be breathing. Nothing unsettles him; without blinking an eye, he absorbs any threat to his power over Orgon – who takes him in, offers him his daughter in marriage and even makes Tartuffe his heir –and simply applies to it a nonsense logic that makes you think of the discourse in Through the Looking-Glass. Tartuffe is a scam artist who uses Christian piety as both a façade and a weapon to control the credulous – Orgon and his ridiculous mother, Madame Pernelle. Broderick takes Tartuffe’s cold-heartedness literally: he’s so unmoved that he might have the body temperature of a reptile. The text tells us that Tartuffe enjoys good food and sex, but even when Orgon’s wife Elmire, in an effort to expose him while her oblivious husband is watching from under the table, comes on to him, he responds greedily to her overtures but there’s no evidence in his face or his tone that she’s given him an erection. We’d swear there was nothing remotely human going on under those Puritan bangs if we didn’t see the way his machinations turn Orgon’s family’s lives upside down.

Along the Spectrum: Recent Movies

Tracey Ullman and Cillian Murphy in Steve. (Photo: Robert Viglasky, Netflix.)

Cillian Murphy and the Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants are a superlative team. Last year Mielants directed Murphy in the beautiful Irish movie Small Things Like These, the best treatment so far of the subject of the Magdalene Sisters, the notorious Irish order that turned pregnant unwed teenage girls into workhorses and then put their babies up for adoption. I loved everything about this film: Enda Walsh’s subtle, precise screenplay, culled from a fine small novel by Claire Keegan; Frank van den Eeden’s moody, delicate lighting; and all the performances, but especially Murphy’s. He plays Bill Furlong, a family man who runs a coal business in an intimate Irish town where the Magdalene convent wields considerable power – they decide which of the local girls gains entrance to their prestigious school. Their backing not only guarantees a better education but guides the students’ path to college and a promising future. So when Bill finds, hiding in the coal bin, one of the girls whose families have dumped them in the convent to sidestep the shame of their situation and she begs him to help her get away, the Mother Superior (Emily Watson) has only to remind him, in a friendly tone, how well two of his five daughters are managing in their school and how much they’re looking forward to admitting the next one in line to secure his silence. (She seals the deal with a generous Christmas tip; this isn’t a prosperous town.) But Bill himself was raised by a single mother, and then, after her early death, by the kind woman she’d worked for as a domestic; he feels his life was blessed by his upbringing at the hands of one brave woman and one with the means and the independence of mind to stand against the social norms of this time and place.

Icke/Sophocles

From Left: Jordan Scowen, Olivia Reis, Mark Strong, Lesley Manville, James Wilbraham, Anne Reid and Bhasker Patel in Oedipus. (Photo: J. Cervantes.)

Robert Icke’s Oedipus, newly transplanted to Broadway from the West End, is, like his 2015 Oresteia, a modern version of a classic work that has resonated through time since the Greeks birthed tragedy. These are the weightiest cornerstones of the genre: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the only complete trilogy we have from among the theatrical constructions the ancient Greek playwrights submitted to the City Dionysia festival in Athens, invented dramatic cause and effect, while Sophocles’ Oedipus, which moves backwards and forwards in time without ever altering the setting, is a marvel of dramatic structure that no one has ever surpassed. Aristotle used it as his model for tragic dramaturgy in the Poetics. The ancient Greek world was a treasure trove of firsts – the Poetics pioneered theatrical criticism.

Being and Somethingness: Barnett Newman: Here

Princeton University Press.

“Here. A place in the world. Proof that one exists. Barnett Newman spent a lifetime searching for confirmation of a simple idea.”

Amy Newman

For many decades as an art historian I have often remarked to those who would listen that what matters most about visual art and art history is not exactly what you’re looking at in front of you. Puzzled expressions often ensue. I frequently share the observation that there’s more to fine art than meets the eye, and that what matters is what’s behind your eyes, not what’s in front of them. In other words, how much you know about what you’re seeing, in the sense not of privileged knowledge but rather of the kind of basic information that can be accessed by anyone who is curious about what’s going on in the world of contemporary art, that quantum which can alter your perception forever. By anyone who can, that is, suspend immediate snap value judgments and pursue any credible art text in any reasonable library. And if my audience were still listening, I would proceed to further clarify this perspective: the image is in front of us but the imagination is in our minds, lurking behind our visual apparatus, just waiting to be fully engaged in a deeply personal and, for lack of a better term, existential revelation.

Two New Books on Indigenous Culture

I. Talking Skin: Indigenous Tattoo Traditions: Humanity Through Skin and Ink

(Princeton University Press.)

“For thousands of years, these communities have etched human experiences into skin, one powerful mark at a time. But sadly, much of that ancient ink is fading fast, along with the knowledge that surrounds it. To me, tattooing isn’t just art; it’s a vital piece of global cultural heritage.”

--Lars Krutak

I’ve always been fascinated with tattoos, ever since I was a kid and used to marvel over my Uncle Johnny’s flamboyantly decorated arms. He was a sailor in the Merchant Marines and often explained to me how every inked image reminded him of some exotic place he had sailed to: “Every picture tells a story, kid, every tattoo sings a song of my travels.” Such a romantic at heart, that Johnny. In the old days, the only folks with tattoos, at least that I knew of, were military guys and members of motorcycle clubs (as they were euphemistically called back then). But that, of course, is merely the popular culture in the West that has celebrated a kind of outlaw status for wearers of the “talking skin.” I don’t have any tattoos myself, never quite worked up the courage to go through that initiation that seemed to lead to an endless road of ink. My Métis wife has some, though, and through her I learned of far older inking cultures for whom the marking of flesh is a significant gesture that embodies a shared communal awareness of place and identity. Indigenous Tattoo Traditions: Humanity Through Skin and Ink Lars Krutak’s new book from Princeton University Press, is both a major contribution to that community of bodily markings which is greatly moving to me as a cultural commentator and a poignant reminder to me of how, in my formative years, I was intrigued by these mobile graphic artifacts, artworks that from my earliest days always felt like a kind of visual music. The songs that indigenous tattoos sing are rooted in a combination of ancestral pride and contemporary swag, and Krutak’s fine tome celebrates their singing in a truly poetic manner worthy of such a noble fusing of art and heritage.

White Christmas and A Christmas Carol: Second-Tier Holiday Cheer

Clyde Alves, Jonalyn Saxer, and the company of White Christmas. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

I loved the stage transcription of Irving Berlin’s 1954 Christmas movie musical White Christmas when it came through Boston in 2006 and again in 2015, so I was looking forward to seeing the Goodspeed Opera House version that opened last week, directed by Hunter Foster. But except for Kelli Barclay’s dance numbers it’s a letdown. The major problem is the acting, which is somehow simultaneously flat and overstated. The book by David Ives and Paul Blake, adapted from the screenplay by Norman Krasna, Norman Panama and Melvin Frank has a fairly complicated plot involving the efforts of Bob Wallace and Phil Davis, a pair of Broadway song and dance men, World War II veterans who fought under a beloved general, to round up their unit in order to pay tribute to him at Christmas when they discover he’s running a ramshackle Vermont inn – and to mount a revue there to put the place in the black. Still, it’s light and casual. The jokes aren’t inspired, but on both tours the clowning had the low-key pleasures of a good old-fashioned TV variety special from the decade of the film. And the characters were all satisfyingly human, so you felt drawn in. At the Goodspeed, the humor feels warmed-over and then juiced up so that you’re doubly aware that what you’re not hearing isn’t fresh. The vaudeville touches make you groan, especially a running gag involving a pair of chorus girls who keep trying to chase Phil (Clyde Alves) down at the worst possible moments, when he’s trying to woo Judy Haynes (Jonalyn Saxer), half of a sister act he and Bob discover in a New York club and end up hiring for the show. And the actors aren’t strong enough to make their characters convincing, including Omar Lopez-Cepero as Bob, Lauren Nicole Chapman as Betty, the other Haynes sister, who falls for him until a misguided rumor makes her think he’s a rat, and Bruce Sabath as General Waverly. (In the movie Bob and Betty were played by Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, Phil and Judy by Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen, and the general by Dean Jagger.)