Less than the Least

Like nearly everyone who loves Italian Renaissance art, I’ve often wondered why hell seems so much more interesting than heaven in the Last Judgment paintings. My own answer has usually been that, because we are sinful, we understand sin and its consequences far better than we do virtue. As a result, sin and punishment spur our imagination (we all have a bit of Dante in us), while heaven often looks more like a celestial game of ring-around-the-rosy (as in Fra Angelico’s lovely depiction at the San Marco monastery in Florence) than the true transformation the creation is groaning toward.

But after encountering Giotto’s Stefaneschi Polyptych in the Vatican Picture Gallery several days ago, I don’t expect to ask the question much any more. I now think it’s possible to show what heaven will look like, at least in a small way, and that Giotto, the thirteenth century Italian artist who transformed Western art, did it.

The hottest ticket in my neighborhood these days is the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. One of the most arresting images in a show filled with startling images is a 1932 painting called “Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States.” Like all of her art, “Self-Portrait” is about Frida. But it’s also about immigration, and for me, at least, it sparked a question I hadn’t thought about before: if Latin American culture suddenly became trendy in the United States, how would this affect the immigration debate?

Making my way through the splendid “Poussin and Nature” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York yesterday, I kept thinking about a comment Jed Perl, the New Republic’s art critic, had made in his review of the show. “At a time when the world around us, political or economic or cultural, seems more disheartening than it has been in at least a generation,” he wrote, “there is something thrilling about Poussin’s conviction that the discipline of painting can make life a little easier to bear.” This statement stayed with me, for two reasons: I couldn’t disagree more about the current political environment, and I never would have thought of Poussin as a painter who would speak to our current condition. Having seen the paintings, I too found them oddly relevant, but I’m still inclined to see the political glass as half full.

Two final stray thoughts on the Nicolas Poussin exhibit at the Met (now over, alas), without the attempt to link the art to current events:

1) According to the wall text, “Poussin studied nature less to imitate its surface effects than to understand its laws.” In the landscapes featured in the show, Poussin seems to take nature apart and reconstruct it. The landscapes and still-lifes of the post-impressionist French artist Paul Cezanne have a somewhat similar architectonic qualify, though he omits the mythological narratives. I wonder if this is part of what Cezanne meant when he said, more than two centuries after Poussin, that he intended “to do Poussin all over again from nature.”

I suppose everyone has a favorite tree. Mine as a child was an elm, the only tree in our backyard, that had a thick, sturdy branch just low enough for kids to jump off into a pile of fall leaves. We’re blessed with a number of trees in our yard in the Philadelphia suburbs, but none as memorable as that elm. The tree with the prettiest leaves in our area is the tulip poplar– the leaves are like miniature fleurs-de-lis and cascade down from the tree’s crown– but we have to walk a few blocks to see one.

If I had to name my least favorite tree in our yard, I might well have settled on a tall, crooked, scraggly pine tree that stood squarely in the middle of our view as we looked out from our screened in back porch.

One of the most exciting contemporary poets is the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. I review "Eternal Enemies," his new book of poems, here. But don't take my word for it. Next time you're in a bookstore, skim through a few of the poems in "Eternal Enemies." Even if you've vowed never to read a book of poems, he may be the kind of poet who will make you change your mind, or at least make a small exception to the vow.

Here's the first poem, "Star" (set in Krakow, where Zagajewski lived during his college years), which establishes the tone of the book:

I returned to you years later,
gray and lovely city,
unchanging city
buried in the waters of the past.

I'm no longer the student
of philosophy, poetry, and curiosity,
I'm not the young poet who wrote
too many lines

and wandered in the maze
of narrow streets and illusions.
The sovereign of clocks and shadows has touched my brow with his hand,

but still I'm guided by
a star by brightness
and only brightness
can undo or save me.

            After poet and Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander was announced as the inaugural poet, fellow poet Paul Muldoon was quoted as saying he was confident the choice was due to literary merit.  I hope there was a twinkle in his eye when he said this.  Literary merit surely was one consideration, but one doesn't have to be a cynic to suspect it wasn't the only one. 

Inaugural poets, like other inaugural speakers, have always been chosen for symbolic reasons as well.  John F. Kennedy's choice of Robert Frost as the first inaugural poet was the closest to entirely merit based.  When John F. Kennedy chose him, Frost was something like our national poet.  He was beloved, had carefully tended his reputation as the people's poet, and was widely (though sometimes grudgingly) admired by other poets.  (The closest poet to this status today is probably Billy Collins, but he does not have Frost's status among fellow poets and does not seem quite so all- American).  Although Frost was an obvious pick, he also symbolized the old fashioned (implicitly Protestant) traditions of rural America, a constituency Kennedy wanted to reach.  Bill Clinton's choice of Maya Angelou in 1993 reinforced his sympathy for minorities, and 1997 Miller Williams represented homespun Arkansas wisdom--Clinton as a man of the people. 

A key attraction of Alexander to Obama, it seems to me, is that her poetry is intensely race conscious, but in a way that is less hostile to mainstream American culture and less anchored in grievance than the work of many of the best known black poets of the past generation.  She is, in a sense, a bridge between that past and post racial politicians like Obama himself.  (More on this, hopefully, in a follow up post on Alexander's poems once I've read more of it).

John Updike was for me a little like an old friend you keep meaning to visit but never quite get around to visiting. Years ago, I read several of his Rabbit novels, and I occasionally read his short stories later on. But in the last decade or so, my contact with his writing has been limited to his art reviews in the New York Review and occasional book reviews.

When I was a teenager in the early 1970s, one would often see Rabbit, Run and perhaps Rabbit Redux on the bookshelves at friends’ houses, next to a lava lamp and a copy of The Happy Hooker. I think it is in part due to my deep ambivalence about that era that I’ve always preferred Updike’s predecessor as the bard of American suburbia, John Cheever.

But Updike’s eye for detail, and the beauty of his sentences, surely justify his reputation as one of the great twentieth century American novelists.   And the world he captured was, in all of its confusion, the world that many of us or our parents lived.

I’d be interested to hear others’ views of Updike, of favorite Updike writings, or of his significance as a writer and critic.

With the possible exception of several Caravaggios, my favorite painting in Rome on my most recent visit was this painting (the reproduction here isn't great) of Saint John the Baptist by Veronese, in the Borghese Gallery. The planes of the painting—John’s body and arms, the trees in the background—are at slightly rakish angles, and the colors—reds, oranges, olives—seem pleasingly unexpected.