Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Hemingway / Lost suitcase

Yayoi Kusama

Hemingway's lost suitcase

Posted on July 31, 2010

In December 1922, Ernest Hemingway was in Switzerland, on assignment as a correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star, covering the Lausanne Peace Conference. The journalist and editor Lincoln Steffens, whom Hemingway had met in Genoa, was also there. Apparently, Steffens was impressed with Hemingway’s writing and asked to see more. Hemingway’s wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, always known as Hadley, was in Paris, where they were living at the time. She packed up all of Hemingway’s papers in a suitcase, to take them to him in Switzerland. She packed everything she could find.

While the train was still standing in the Gare de Lyon, Hadley went to buy a bottle of Evian water for the trip. She left the suitcase unattended on the train while she did so. When she came back, it was gone.

At that point, nothing of Hemingway’s fiction had been published. In Paris, there was nothing left. With touching thoroughness, Hadley had packed both the originals and their carbons. Only two short stories survived the disaster. “Up in Michigan”, which he had buried in a drawer because Gertrude Stein had said it was unpublishable, while “My Old Man” was out with an editor at a magazine.

Hadley and Ernest Hemingway

In a letter to Ezra Pound, in January 1923, Hemingway wrote: “I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenalia? I went up to Paris last week to see what was left and found that Hadley had made the job complete by including all carbons, duplicates, etc. All that remains of my complete works are three pencil drafts of a bum poem which was later scrapped, some correspondence between John McClure and me, and some journalistic carbons. You, naturally, would say, ‘Good’ etc. But don’t say it to me. I ain’t yet reached that mood.”

But maybe he did reach that mood. “The first and most important thing of all, for writers today,” Hemingway later said, “is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.” Juvenilia (or Juvenalia in Hemingway’s misspelling) are often just that – rambling, unstructured, wayward pieces of adolescent hopes and dreams. Which of us would gladly publish our teenage love poetry?

Hemingway had his language stripped clean all right. Indeed, with the loss of the manuscripts, and with time pressing to replace those vanished words in his bid to become a respected writer, Hemingway may have adopted and adapted the lean prose style for which he became famous.

(It is often said that he used the style guide of the Kansas City Star, where he had been a cub reporter, as his rule-book: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English.”)

Hemingway never bothered to run a newspaper advertisement seeking the return of the manuscripts. When he considered one, he thought of offering a reward of 150 francs. About ten dollars. Grace under pressure? Or a sign that the manuscripts were not so valuable?

They would be valuable today, of course. If they survived. If they ever turned up.

What did the thief do, on realising that the stolen suitcase contained paper, worthless paper with the juvenile scribblings of an unknown writer? No gold, no diamonds, no lucrative passports to be traded on the black market. Throw them in the Seine? Burn them? Bury them in an attic?

Of course, if they do turn up in an attic, these lost manuscripts of a Nobel prize-winning author, they will be worth more than their weight in gold.

http://lostmanuscripts.com/2010/07/31/hemingways-lost-suitcase/

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

David Douglas Duncan / Picasso and Lump

David Douglas Duncan

Pablo Picasso and Lump

In 1957, renowned war photographer, David Douglas Duncan, took his camera and his Dachshund, Lump (Rascal in German), to shoot his favorite new subject, Pablo Picasso. Upon arrival at Picasso’s Villa Californie, Lump made himself at home and stayed for six years. There, he sat beside the famously private artist as he worked, found his way into 44 paintings, and became “the only dog Picasso took in his arms.” Relish Lump’s fabulous life in Duncan’s wonderful book, Picasso & Lump: A Dachshund’s Odyssey.

SINDROME DE STENDHAL
WIKIPEDIA EN INGLÉS
WIKIPEDIA EN ALEMÁN

Monday, December 1, 2014

With Self-Portrait of a Lifetime, Picasso Returns to Paris Pedestal

The Picasso Museum in Paris has reopened

after a renovation that more than doubled its size.

With Self-Portrait of a Lifetime,

Picasso Returns to Paris Pedestal

The Picasso Museum Reopens in Paris

By Holland Cotter

The New York Times, October 27, 2014

Photos by Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Pablo Picasso

PARIS — “Give me a museum and I’ll fill it,”Pablo Picasso reportedly said. Whether he did say it or not, it sounds like him, serial overproducer. And in a gray, leaf-drifting October here he’s as good as his word. The Picasso Museum, which closed for expansion in 2009, has finally reopened at more than twice its former size, but years overschedule and wrapped in a swirl of intrigue.

For the news media, the renovation project has been a gift. Work on the Baroque mansion that houses the museum, the world’s largest Picasso collection, dragged scandalously on and on. Budgets ballooned. There were shocked firings (Anne Baldassari, the museum’s director was dismissed), high-level hissy fits and ad hominem attacks galore. Who could ask for more?

The renovated Picasso Museum, closed since 2009 for renovation, finally reopened on Saturday in the Hôtel Salé, a Baroque 17th-century mansion. Ed Alcock for The New York Times

The art-loving public could. The museum, which debuted in 1985, is a popular draw. No matter how many great individual Picasso works there are in London, Madrid or New York, in its museum Paris has the artist himself, early and late, in major and minor mode. No wonder anxious crowds lined the sidewalks and swarmed the front door here for the public opening on Saturday.

Once inside, what do they get? Fabulousness — and frustration. On the unqualified positive side, there are more than 400 Picasso works encompassing his career, along with a gemlike selection of pieces he owned by artists he loved: Chardin, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, Braque, Miró, Matisse and Henri Rousseau. And in a sense, even his own work here represents a personal choice.

In breadth, texture and spirit, the exhibition is like no other. It is utterly different from, say, the large selection of Picassos in “Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection” now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met show is a classic lineup of trophy masterpieces. What’s at the Picasso Museum is closer to a sublime teaching collection, with scraps and masterworks mixed together. The goal here is less to monumentalize an artist or a style than to tell a complex story of how art is made by one person of protean energy over a specific stretch of time.

Picasso was a lifelong self-collector who kept examples of his art that he couldn’t or didn’t want to relinquish: juvenilia, pictorial notes to self, finished favorites, and souvenirs of loves and traumas gone by. He left this archive, or accumulation, to family members when he died in 1973. They sifted it and gave a vast amount to the French government in lieu of paying inheritance tax. It is this collection, essentially shaped by the artist himself, that the museum is built on.

A visitor viewing some of the museum’s 437 works on display, which include not only ones by Picasso but works by artists he admired. Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Given such richly personal material, it’s too bad the new presentation at the Picasso Museum — officially the Musée Picasso Paris — isn’t telling that story more persuasively. Architecture is part of the problem. The museum’s 17th-century home, the Hôtel Salé, in the historic Marais district, with its garden, courtyard and two-story, sculpture-encrusted entrance hall, has never been ideal for showing art.

The interior is choppy, with smallish spaces, dead ends, and illogical connections. The original 1980s renovation laid a white-walled Corbusian gloss over this without achieving a sense of unity. The new design, by the architect Jean-François Bodin, is basically a magnified version of the old plan. There’s more space — four floors of galleries, including a vaulted basement and loftlike attic with exposed beams and views of surrounding rooftops — but their order is still hard to navigate.

An impression of discontinuity is compounded by the idiosyncratic arrangement of art devised by Ms. Baldassari, who stayed on the job just long enough to organize the inaugural show. The main installation, on the first and second floors, begins with a few paintings by the adolescent Picasso in Spain, where he was born in 1881, and others from his first stay in Paris when he was barely out of his teens. The shift is dramatic: Murillo-style realism one year, the equivalent of psychedelia the next.

But the time frame quickly grows confusing. The collection’s earliest painting, “The Barefoot Girl,” from 1895, turns up two galleries away with some near-abstract 1930s sculpture. Elsewhere, a pairing of the “blue” self-portrait from 1901 with a sketchy moon-face one from 1972 makes sense in a compare-and-contrast way. But putting them with the 1914 Cubist “Man With a Mustache” and a bronze head from 1958 doesn’t, unless you’re saying that all Picasso male heads are self-portraits, which they aren’t.

A detail from Picasso’s sculpture “A Man With a Sheep” (1943). Ed Alcock for The New York Times

The trouble is, Ms. Baldassari doesn’t say anything at all about the choices she’s making. Labels with information are absent. The unstated idea, in curatorial vogue at the moment, is that art speaks for itself, end of story. But this isn’t so, and hasn’t been since the 18th century, when most art was still about politics and religion and pitched to a privileged insider audience. Art has changed; audiences have changed, widened. Today, no single body of shared knowledge can be assumed. Viewers need help, and deserve the choice to avail themselves of it.

By way of compromise, Ms. Baldassari shapes the show around a few loose themes. Under the label “Primitive” she has brought together an astonishing array of small paintings and drawings that demonstrate, step by audacious step, how “Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon” came into being in 1907. Under “War Paintings,” we see the 1937 “Guernica” simultaneously coalescing and sending sparks out in future directions.

Much of the museum’s collection, though, is from an in-between period, the late 1920s to the early 1930s, when Picasso was coming off his post-World War I “classical” phase, getting his radical mojo back, and beginning to think of himself as a surrealist. It was tough going. The new work didn’t sell too well — possibly that’s the reason he kept so much of it — and you can see why: It’s strong, aggressive stuff. Everything is teeth and genitals, penetrations and impalings. Bodies, mostly female, are crudités of detached limbs. Picasso appears repeatedly in the alter-ego of the Minotaur, an Ovidian sex machine.

Work from his sex-and-violence phase feels right at home in Paris this fall. An exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, “Sade: Attacking the Sun,” is a tribute to the Divine Marquis and an orgy of erotically tortured figures. (The Picasso Museum lent paintings to the show.) At the Pompidou Center, Marcel Duchamp makes all sorts of slice-and-dice moves on the human form in a fine-tuned show of his paintings. And the Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy has brought his elaborately offensive “Chocolate Factory” to Monnaie de Paris, a former mint, where blonde-wigged workers of various genders turn out edible versions of sex toys and Santa Clauses.

When Mr. McCarthy installed a big blowup sculpture of one of the sex toys — he coyly titled it “Tree” — in the Place Vendôme, he was slapped by an offended local, opening a window on a reactionary side of French politics usually hidden from short-term visitors. But it’s there, always has been, and Picasso, the insider who was always an outsider, knew this.

All together, you can learn a tremendous amount about him in the Picasso Museum show, not least that he could be a truly terrible artist. Maybe the biggest revelation, though, comes on the top floor, when you catch your first glimpse of a Cézanne landscape Picasso once owned, and instantly sense what’s been missing from the two floors below: focus, concentration, a point of repose, warmth like a light in a tunnel, a fire in a hearth, a vigil lamp in a church.

The comparison of Cézanne to Picasso we see here is of painter to cartoonist, of steady walker to competition dancer. It’s hard even to imagine Picasso painting landscapes — though he did; there’s one nearby — because, judging by this jumpy show, he doesn’t know how to be quiet, to sit there, stop spewing, do nothing, look long. Yet I can imagine him entering the gallery, as we do, nerves keyed up, and seeing Cézanne with a jolt of relief. It’s fitting that after Picasso died at 91, he was laid to rest in the garden of his summer home, a chateau not so different from the Hôtel Salé, but in the South of France, in view of Cézanne’s beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire. Not that he was particularly sentimental about the connection. He was territorial to the end. “Cézanne painted these mountains and now they are mine,” he is said to have boasted. And Paris owns Picasso, or a comprehensive chunk of him, and whatever the failings of the Picasso Museum, that’s just a fact.

The Picasso Museum is in the Hôtel Salé, 5 Rue de Thorigny, Paris; museepicassoparis.fr/en/.

A version of this review appears in print on October 28, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: With Self-Portrait of a Lifetime, Picasso Returns to Paris Pedestal.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The 100 best novels / No 63 / Party Going by Henry Green (1939)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 63

Party Going

by Henry Green (1939)

Set on the eve of war, this neglected modernist masterpiece centres on a group of bright young revellers delayed by fog

Henry Green’s Party Going / An eccentric portrait of the idle rich

Henry Green / The Novelist of Human Unknowability

Robert McCrum
Monday 1 December 2014

enry Green is the pseudonym of Henry Yorke, an Oxford friend of Evelyn Waugh (No 60 in this series). Precociously gifted, Green/Yorke wrote an avant-garde novel, Blindness, while still at Eton, but never enjoyed anything close to Waugh’s success.

His first mature fiction, Living, was a modernist tour de force, partly inspired by his experience on the shop-floor of his family’s Midlands bottle factory. There’s an irony in the success of this debut. Yorke was, as he put it in his memoir, Pack My Bag, “born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon in 1905”. Growing up in the inter-war years, he was part of a highly gifted generation that included Christopher Isherwood, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell.

Party Going, published on the brink of the second world war, reflects that experience. It’s the polar opposite of Living, but quite as dazzling in the poetry of its prose, a masterpiece of literary impressionism. I came to read it, as a respite from my first job in the book world, sitting against the radiator, on the floor of the Hogarth Press library in William IV Street, in the West End.

Henry Green

Party Going offers the last word on that “low, dishonest decade”, the 1930s. A group of bright young things – Max, Amabel, Angela, Julia, Evelyn and Claire – are on their way to a house party in France, by train. But fog is rolling in from the Channel. England is cut off, and the railway paralysed; their train has been delayed. So the party – quintessentially shallow, vapid and spoilt – holes up in the station hotel to wait for the fog to lift, a brilliant fictional premise.

Outside, in the metropolitan gloom, people come and go like spectres. “It’s terrifying,” says one of the girls, in a line that could have come from Waugh, “I didn’t know there were so many people in the world.”

A shadowy old woman, Miss Fellowes, retrieves a dead pigeon from the street, and washes it in a strange and disturbing act of piety.

In another brilliant scene that’s cinematic in its intensity, Amabel takes a bath in the hotel. Meanwhile, she and Max struggle with their feelings, at once flirting with, and then avoiding, intimacy.

The critic VS Pritchett wrote that Green’s special subject is “the injury done to certain English minds by the main, conventional emphases of English life”. There, for me, is where the fascination of Party Going lies. Green paints an unforgettable portrait of a doomed, amoral world whose characters, trapped in the fog, are somehow waltzing blithely towards oblivion. The weather outside the hotel represents the menacing blur of the future. Sebastian Faulks wittily describes aspects of Party Going as if “a scene from Private Lives has been revised by Samuel Beckett”.

Once war comes, it will be time for end-game, not carousel. Strikingly, Green’s later fiction becomes increasingly difficult and austere with Loving, a tale of life in an Anglo-Irish country house, his outstanding late achievement.

A note on the text

Party Going, Henry Green’s second novel, followed his acclaimed modernist debut, Living, and marked the high point of his literary career. Party Going was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s imprint, the Hogarth Press, in 1939, just before the outbreak of war. Within a few years it had acquired a distinguished retinue of literary admirers – including Auden, Isherwood and Eudora Welty – but never quite moved beyond a cult audience. Thereafter, encroaching deafness and a reclusive temperament cut him off from the world, and slowly stifled his creativity. After the age of 47, he never wrote again. Indeed, his most entertaining contribution to literary life was the hilarious interview he gave to Terry Southern for an early edition of the Paris Review.

In the 1970s, Party Going, Living and Loving were collected into a single paperback volume published by Picador, an imprint of Pan Books. The experiment did not prosper. Nevertheless, the same combination was repeated first by Penguin in 1993, and again by Vintage (Random House) in 2005, with similarly dismal results. Despite the passionate advocacy of John Updike in America, and Sebastian Faulks in Britain, among many critics, Henry Green remains what the Paris Review described as “the writer’s writer’s writer”. I’m probably not alone in thinking he deserves a better posterity.