My Last Breath by Luis Bunuel (1983)

Bunuel by Salvador Dali

Salman Rushdie calls Spanish film director Luis Bunuel's memoir My Last Breath, “pure delight”. I agree and would add that from the dedication page, through the photographs and to his last chapter, aptly-titled Swan Song (Bunuel died shortly after the book was finished), Bunuel treats the reader to an entertaining, sensitive chronicle of his personal and professional life.

My Last Breath is also a work of art in and of itself, demonstrating how beautifully and precisely the filmic expertise of its creator has been adapted to the the written word. Descriptions are not overly long or adjective-heavy but they are carefully measured so that scene after scene opens, reveals a moment, an incident, then closes and a new scene opens elsewhere in time, giving us another detail or an idea which eventually leads to a full and satisfying story. Here is a filmmaker who is able to use words as effectively as celluloid to create close-ups, panoramic shots and flashbacks to relay a story.

Memory, the first chapter, lasting a mere three pages, introduces us to Bunuel's skills. In these dozen paragraphs, he tells us about the relationship of memory to old age, identity, fidelity and tragedy. Here is the first paragraph:

During the last ten years of her life, my mother gradually lost her memory. When I went to see her in Saragossa, where she lived with my brothers, I watched the way she read magazines, turning the pages carefully, one by one, from the first to the last. When she finished, I'd take the magazine from her, then give it back, only to see her leaf through it again, slowly, page by page.

Imagine this scene in a film: short, compact, silent, devastating....

Luis Bunuel was, of course, best known for his surrealist films, his collaborations with Salvador Dali (indulging as he did, in “vestimentary provocation”), his friendship with Federico Garcia Lorca but above all, he was a storyteller of great elegance.

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Intimacy (1998) by Hanif Kureishi

Some authors are bigger than their works – their lives are larger, more complex, more controversial than their protagonists' lives ever are. Some authors lead quiet lives and they create characters who do all their sinning for them. Hanif Kureishi lies on the edges of the first camp and his novel “Intimacy” encourages the reader to think about how to read a work of fiction that is so obviously grounded in the author's own life.

“Intimacy” is a short book written and published shortly after Kureishi left his wife and two young sons to pursue another woman. In the novel, Jay, the narrator, does the same thing. The comparison between Hanif and Jay should ideally stop here, but it doesn't...

Jay is a complicated, intelligent but altogether disagreeable character who, when asked by a friend, “Don't you believe in anything? Or is virtue only a last resort for you?”, will answer, “I believe in individualism, in sensualism and in creative idleness. I like the human imagination : its delicacy, its brutal aggressive energy, its profundity, its power to transform the material world into art. I like what men and women make. I prefer this to everything else on earth, apart from love and women's bodies, which are at the centre of everything worth living for.”

This is a Big Statement made by Jay in this novel and other characters in other Kureishi novels and by the author himself in interviews he has given over the years. Whether the reader agrees or disagrees with such a credo (it would make a good topic of conversation in an ethics class or a reading group), the problem remains this : how does the reader of literature assess a work of art when the artist's own life and opinions are transposed onto the life of the characters?

Do I like Jay? No. He is an existentialist fool.  Do I understand him? Yes. Do I like Kureishi? Well, how much like Jay is he really? And finally, should this matter?

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A Sweeper-Up After Artists : a memoir by Irving Sandler (2003)

One could say that the title Irving Sandler chose for his memoir is perfect. After all, it comes from a Frank O'Hara poem which names Sandler personally (a kind of immortality already) and it implicates poet and art critic in the altogether exhilarating moment in American culture where abstract expressionism (Americana, pure and simple) is born. Frank O'Hara registers the moment in his poetry and Irving Sandler sweeps it up, organizes it, makes sense of it, shows us the glorious dirty/clean floors, splotches of paint, discarded early efforts – and every sentence is pure gold.

L to R: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko,
Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Rotert Motherwell,
Bradley Walker Tomlin, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlied, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne.
Photo by Nina Leen in Life Magazine, January 15, 1951.

Sandler shows us the main players as well as the odd, minor pundit and punter. Take the Vogels, for example : Herbert and Dorothy – two tiny people, he a post-office worker, she a librarian, both with a modest salary but an uncanny eye for the new or the up-and-coming – in the span of 50 years, they fill their tiny New York apartment with avant garde art that they eventually bequeath to Washington's National Gallery. Sandler knew them and many other unusual people personally. The Vogel's is a lovely story and one which Sandler squeezes into pages that also recall the likes of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko.

There is also a brilliant chapter devoted to the clash of the titans: the unmovable, curmudgeonly, formalist art critic Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, the existentialist and inventor of the term "action painting" (with the focus on "action"). Sandler regales us with stories of his encounters with these two but he also teaches us a great deal about art history, connoisseurship and the real life battles that produce what we come to regard as the canon.

This book was a pleasure to read. It ended too quickly. More Irving Sandler in my library, please.

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Marie Laurencin, Marmottan Museum in Paris

I once met an art historian who made it his retirement project to seek out and photograph all known Johannes Vermeer paintings. After seeing five of Marie Laurencin’s paintings in a corner of the Orangerie Museum in Paris last year, I half-thought about doing the same (so lovely and so haunting were those works). A bit of digging revealed that the bulk of Marie’s paintings, watercolours and ballet costume sketches had been bought and whisked away to Japan where her biggest fan, industrialist Masahiro Takano, established a museum in 1983 to house her art. Thankfully, after a half century of relative anonymity (she was a much sought-after portraitist in the 1920s but then forgotten) 90 of Marie Laurencin’s works have been reassembled at the Marmottan Gallery in Paris. 

Marie Laurencin’s trademark pink, blue, grey and turquoise palate, her interior, mostly female and small animal groupings, and her outdoor, girls-astride-horses impressionist-inspired scenes are simultaneously innocent and voluptuous. They have been described as “Sapphic”, “fresh”, “ambiguous” and “evanescent”. 

It has been suggested by the curatorial staff at the Orangerie that over time, “la magie s’évente”, that the magic of the early and middle works turns stale despite modifications and nuanced changes in her style. Essentially, her late work “trades in its mystery for smoothness”.

Perhaps. Marie’s declining eyesight may have been a factor. And, late in her career she did introduce the occasional (misplaced) dark line into her paintings to delineate boundaries and stem the fuzziness. Nevermind. She was one of only three or four women painters in Paris during the Picasso-Braque revolution who helped invent modern art. Those lovely figures, most of whom have piercing black eyes and pale oval faces will forever hail the viewer, and ask us all to look and look some more.

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Gertrude Stein: A Composite Portrait (1974), Gertrude Stein Remembered (1994)

Let’s play a literary guessing game. The clues go from hardest to easiest. Ten points if you get it on the first go (you won’t). Guess who this couple is...

1. One is a “rhomboidal woman”, the other is a “deciduous female”.
2. The first one looks like a “great pyramidal Buddha”, the other, a “sleepy vulture”.
3. A is an “Easter Island idol”, B is a “gypsy”;
4. The dominant one looks like a “caesar” and has the “assurance of Cleopatra”, the one in a supporting role is a “swarthy-faced shrew with a furry mustache”.
5. The writer penned “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”, the cook is best known for her hash brownie recipe.

You guessed it — Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas.
Linda Simon has edited two excellent collections of reminiscences by people who knew the couple personally. They’re an entertaining read, mixing academic seriousness (is Gertrude an “eccentric innovator with no inheritors”) with plain, friendly gossip. Any student of modernism, American expats in the first half of the twentieth century or any traveler going to Paris today will enjoy these two books.

Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society, Yale University

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On Henry Miller, The Devil at Large by Erica Jong (1993)

“He was always seeking 'life more abundant' as he says at the end of 'The Colossus of Maroussi'. Sex was one path towards abundance. Travel, another. Conversation, letter-writing, and painting were still others.” “He” in this quote is Henry Miller, most famously the author of 'Tropic of Cancer' and 'Tropic of Capricorn', two semi-autobiographical novels written in Paris between 1934 and 1939, banned for a quarter century and finally published in North America in 1961.

What was all the fuss about?

Erica Jong, herself a controversial writer, author of 'Fear of Flying' (1974) has written 'On Henry Miller, The Devil at Large' to help explain the checkered history of this 20th century American artist.

Even if all you know of Henry Miller comes from cultural references, footnotes, occasional sightings in films like Warren Beatty's 'Reds' (1981) or in documentaries like 'Dinner with Henry Miller' (1979) or if you've only seen the Philip Kaufman film 'Henry and June' (1990), you will understand the 'life more abundant' reference. With Henry Miller, stream-of-consciousness passages are abundant; depictions of bodily functions are abundant; slang words too; as are the descriptions of erotic acts and thoughts penned and uttered every chance Miller got.

Erica Jong's book is enormously entertaining even if it is somewhat preachy or self-indulgent in places. But to be fair, the book is not exclusively a biography of Miller - it is also the story of her friendship with Henry, it delivers a scholarly and literary assessment of him as a personality and a fellow artist.

Jong's book also contextualizes the legal and literary debates that have taken place over issues of erotica, pornography and publishing over the 20th century. A bit of chest-thumping is to be expected and even encouraged from the literary godchild of Anais Nin.

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ANNI '30 - The Thirties The Arts In Italy Beyond Fascism

The pamphlet that accompanies the exhibition on Italian art in Fascist Italy is provocative and augurs well for a good two hours of art enjoyment. The exhibition does not deliver all that it promises. Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones contends that far from showing 1930s Italian art as a cauldron of experimentation, it takes the viewer through a “bleak journey into the aesthetic lifelessness of a totalitarian society”.

The day I visited the exhibition (November 24) I overheard snippets of conversation, some of which echoed my own impressions while others seemed unduly harsh. Here is a sample:

I understand that the Fascists didn't have a strict policy on art like the Nazis or Stalin did... No guidelines, no style privileged over another, no particular theme, no explicit political message...strangely liberal for Mussolini.

What happened if the state decided it didn't like a particular work of art?... I'd have been nervous about producing anything and entering any work in those state-sponsored competitions...

They were allowed to experiment but nobody did... So much of it looks like work by other artists from other places...like these Van Gogh-like paintings.

It's worth bearing in mind that what we are seeing was filtered by decisions made by a curator in 2012...

In the end, I'm not sure the exhibition has much to say about Fascism at all, at least not more than it has to say about the limiting effect of employing art as an extension of state... This stuff was not asked to do much and it does very little. Not like those great big, colourful Soviet posters we see from time to time..they're beautiful even if they were ideologically driven and heavy-handed.

If the art had been hung up somewhere and just the dates of the paintings and the names of the artists were posted, I bet that most people would say that this was an exhibition of amateur art in the Depression era in Italy...

My verdict: the little posters punctuating the exhibition which told the personal stories of people who lived through the decade were charming but too many of the paintings lacked “soul” - and perhaps that is what made them representative of the Fascist decade in Italy.

ANNI '30 - The Thirties The Arts In Italy Beyond Fascism is at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence from 22 September 2012 to 27 January 2013

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