Silverlake Blvd.

Dawn Upshaw & Emanuel Ax @ Disney Hall

I’m sure that when Golijov finally completes the music Upshaw and Ax commissioned, it will be exquisitely sad and transporting and we will love it, but the other night I was happy have the last-minute stand-in of Stephen Prutsman’s Piano Lessons give Upshaw (and Ax) an opportunity to show their lighter, comedic side. It’s not something that’s apparent in her High Modernist repertoire.

 

Upshaw also made a case for Chopin’s songs, which are probably neglected because of the (Polish) language barrier. Moja pieszczotka (My darling) was shattering. Is there an album in the works, I hope?

 

I’ve never been really struck by Emanuel Ax, but this time he presented four Chopin Mazurkas as if he were improvising them on the spot, with just the right mixture of discipline.

 

The real event of the evening was Upshaw performing a dozen songs by Schumann. Undistracted by a score, she dramatized each mood, each phrase—alternately ecstatic, heart-sick, neurotic, cheeky, grave.

 

Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (1952)

 

 

“On the bus I began thinking that William had been right and I was annoyed to have to admit it. Mimosa did lose its first freshness too quickly to be worth buying and I must not allow myself to have feelings, but must only observe the effects of other people’s.”

Nixon in China @ Long Beach Opera

 

 

The uber-Seventies-American-corporate-imperial Terrace Theater (Gibbs & Gibbs, 1978) was a bit intimidating for the cash-strapped Long Beach company. Nevertheless it was a thrilling show: the music is magnificent, and the orchestra and all the principals were terrific.

 

The staging had its ups and downs. The opening arrival scene was beautiful to look at and well done. Many of the scenes are challenging because they have no dramatic shape. I thought they did a good job at the Nixon-Mao meeting scene, the point of which is their mutual incomprehension. But the banquet was tacky, and the epilogue was boring—though it’s hard to imagine how anybody could make it work.

 

The ballet, the play within the play that is the key to the whole opera, was frequently incoherent, but ended well. It’s a fable about the power of myths to become reality, and to become reality even for those who cynically manipulate them to gain power. Unfortunately still relevant.

Renoir @ LACMA

 

 

LACMA’s Renoir in the 20th century was a disappointment. In our 21st century Puritan era, we accept sanctimoniousness for seriousness in art and politics, and could benefit from a jolt of old-fashioned hedonism.

 

I can’t think of anybody more deserving of a rehabilitation than Renoir, but this exhibition isn’t going to do it. The pictures were mostly duds, except for the two landscapes (big and small) with two nudes, the study of Jean drawing, and the big nude from Chicago.

 

The best excuse for the exhibit is the chance to see some of the sculptures he made with the assistance of Richard Guino: the Victorious Venus, the semi-allegorical images of Water and Fire.

 

The sculptures are all from Philadelphia. Which is also where the Barnes Collection is (or was), which makes the best case for Renoir. 

J.G. Farrell's Troubles (1970)

 

 

It starts out like a Cold Comfort Farm-type clever farce, but develops into something stranger, about the lure of inertia, even in the midst of the Irish civil war:

 

“The Major only glanced at the newspaper these days, tired of trying to comprehend a situation which defied comprehension, a war without battles or trenches. Why should one bother with the details: the raids for arms, the shootings of policemen, the intimidations? What could one learn from the details of chaos?”

MOCA @ 30

 

 

MOCA’s First Thirty Years self-retrospective turned out to be merely nice, not great. It’s always nice to see their Rothko and Klein rooms, and their Rosenquists, Mardens, and McLaughlins.

 

But … besides the terrific new Al Jensen (A Quadrilateral Oriented Vision, Per I–Per VI, 1960) and a new blue Ad Reinhardt, all they’ve got going for themselves is still the Panza collection, acquired decades ago, and which even then didn’t count as contemporary art.

 

If the goal of the exhibit was to make claims for the collection, it failed. If you want to play the historical importance game, nothing in the collection really rates a picture in the art history textbooks other than the Rauschenberg with the chicken on top.

 

This doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with the work per se, but it’s exasperating when you think about their works by local artists. They have nice Irwins of different eras, but not one significant work by Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Richard Diebenkorn, Mike Kelley, Alexis Smith, David Hockney, Ken Price, Larry Bell, Michael Asher, Alan Sekula, Charles Ray ….

 

With nothing really outstanding and nothing especially L.A. about it, it could be a collection in Ireland, Korea or Dubai.

Sackville St., as it was

 

 

Oliver St. John Gogarty’s As I was going down Sackville Street; a fantasy in fact (1937) is in fact a collection of outrageous pub talk from his Dublin cronies, beginning with Bishop Berkley: “We Irishmen are apt to think something and nothing are near neighbors.”

 

“Our library rather prides itself on its heresies, of which we have most erudite commentaries.”

 

“Politics is the chloroform of the Irish people or, rather, the hashish.”

 

“We inhale the Atlantic vapours and they turn us into mystics, poets, politicians and unemployables with school-girl complexions …”

 

“Our idea of Freedom … is unrestricted opportunity for victimization. Or for putting a premium on incompetence.”

 

“We must not conform to the unceremonious.” (Yeats, on the importance of silk hats in the Free State)

 

 “Your point, Mr. Russell?” (Michael Collins cutting off an esoteric ramble by AE)

 

“The worst thing about him is that when he is not drunk he is sober.” (Yeats on Lionel Johnson)

 

“His job was in the Oriental department of the National Museum; but when he took to jumping out from a replica of an Assyrian tomb in the Egyptian section on little girls, the Authorities superannuated him.”

Rembrandt & pupils @ the Getty

 

 

Rembrandt is too much work: too old-fashioned, too dark, too psychological, too analog. I remember putting off going to a gigantic Rembrandt print exhibit in Rome till my last day in town; I was arted-out, and not up to it. But of course it turned out to be unforgettable, getting the Italian point of view.

 

And then there’s the experience of suddenly getting attacked by paintings like the Flora in the Met, or the National Gallery’s Woman bathing in a stream, that leave you destroyed, and make every other kind of picture seem pointless.

 

Fortunately we overcame our laziness to make it to the last day of the Getty’s Drawings by Rembrandt & His Pupils.

 

We got there before it opened, and had a hour of decent viewing before the crowd got out of hand, and then had the rest of the day to recover in the sunshine of the garden and café.

 

Recover is the word. It was a tough show. It was set up as a drawing lesson: a sequence of comparisons with a drawing by Rembrandt and a drawing by a Pupil of the same subject or style. The text panels presented an analysis based on the assumption that when Rembrandt made a drawing, no matter how sketchy, the marks were never decorative or doodles, but always purposeful indications of light, texture, weight and above all psychological interaction. Whether true or false, this unfortunately became a stick with which to beat the poor Pupils.

 

There were plenty of Rembrandts that stopped you dead. The British Museum’s Study of Hendrickje Sleeping (1654-5) that became ubiquitous in L.A. in the exhibition banners. It’s so beautiful and outside of any period style it could have come from 16^th century China or 1950s New York.

 

The Seated female nude from the Chicago Art Institute was in a similar style, but less genial, expressing a more complicated kind of regard.

 

Rembrandt’s curiosity and openness were demonstrated in Three studies of a bearded man (1636-40), as well as his ability to express brutality (Cain slaying Abel, 1642).

 

But despite the text panels, I’m not sure all the comparisons were entirely in Rembrandt’s favor.

 

I have a book that reproduces Willem Drost’s Angel departing from the family of Tobit as Rembrandt. And why not? It’s one of the most convincing images of visionary experience in art. It shows what people must look like after they’ve had a revelation.

 

But the pupil drawing I wanted to take home was the completely decorative Cottages beneath high trees in bright sunlight (circa 1660) by Constantijn Daniel van Renesse. 

 

 

Anonymous 4 @ WDCH

Anonymous 4’s English Ladymass concert was one of the most intense musical experiences I’ve ever had. So pure: just four voices and the space of a half-empty Disney Hall. 13th century English plainchant: Repetitive, aimless but hypnotic. I was in a trance. After it was over I felt as if I had just been for a swim in the ocean.

 

Posthumous Pym 2

An Academic Question, written 1971-2, published 1986.

 

Narrated by Caro, who attempts to find her way in a provincial university, a nest of ridiculous sociologists (headed by her husband Alan). The hideous end of the Seventies is well done. There is a fine MacGuffin in the purloined manuscript that in the end is destroyed by an accidental fire. Caro is a bit too wretched and wrecked; she’s not a welcome companion. Still she has her eyes open:

 

When I appeared again to announce that lunch was ready and to try to force them into the dining room before the soup got cold, I could sense that there had been a change in the atmosphere. Alan and Ian were sitting silently, the latter rather like a sulky girl with his brooding expression and shoulder-length hair, while Iris and Rollo, evidently absorbed in each other’s company, were carrying on the kind of conversation that is difficult to extend beyond the parties involved. It seemed that she had offered him an article for publication in the journal, or perhaps he had asked for one, for she was putting on a little-girl act, saying that she couldn’t possibly write anything good enough to please him, but that it had always been her ambition, etc., etc., while Rollo looked fatuously pleased and pink in the face. He is a man easily flatered by women, I thought, and wondered if there was any advantage for us in his piece of knowledge.