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Cleaver Magazine

Fresh-Cut Lit & Art

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Category Archives: art book reviews

ART CAN HELP, essays by Robert Adams, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 3, 2019 by thwackJuly 8, 2020

ART CAN HELP
by Robert Adams
Yale University Art Gallery, distributed by Yale University Press, 88 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart 

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Art Can Help Book Jacket

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“[I]f you begin with an idea you’re usually beat before you start,” writes Robert Adams in Art Can Help, as he tries to imagine Edward Ranney photographing the Canyon del Muerto, and, so, here I begin, having been holding this slender silver volume in my hand all afternoon, interrupted only by the sound of a neighbor’s lawn mower and the smell of some ambient spray paint.

(A long sentence, a beginning.)

The book marks Adams’ attempt to dissuade his readers from Jeff Koons-style glitz, which is to say “imitations that distract us or, openly or by implication, ridicule hope.” We are reminded of the power of art, Adams suggests, by studying art that is real.

The work of Edward Hopper is here in these pages, as are the images of Eugene Buechel, Ken Abbott, Julia Margaret Cameron, Dorothea Lange, and others, but if you are already concluding that this is a book of pictures and captions, you’d be wrong. This is a book of eclectic wisdoms and collegial awe.

“I am asked with surprising frequency, ‘How do you know where to make pictures?’” Adams, himself a famed photographer of the American West, announces as he ponders Eric Paddock’s miniaturized views of Colorado’s byways. Adams answers the question like this: “To the extent there is a rule, the answer is that it is usually where you stop long enough.”

(Where you stop. Long enough.)

Robert Adams author photo

Robert Adams

The earned erudition is useful, it seems to me, for novelists and poets, memoirists and playwrights who wonder—an occupational hazard—where and what the story is. Indeed, so much of the book serves as a primer for the questing soul, as Adams encourages beauty without sentimentality; heralds the plausibility of gifts; hails Terri Weifenbach’s portrait of a hovering bee “as aeronautically improbable as an angel.” Adams reminds us that “some of the best photographs are both discouraging and encouraging at once.” He prompts us with this thought: “Is there anyone more comically, more courageously of another world than a grade-school music teacher, especially a band teacher?”

(Imagine a story about that. Pause to see it.)

When Adams quotes from Emmet Gowin, who photographed the Nevada test range—“What we all want in our lives is a way to put ourselves into accord with the mystery out of which we came and into which we will return.”—we have no choice but to close the book and close our eyes and ponder what this means while, beyond, the lawn mower mows and the can of spray paint sprays.

Adams wants us to take heart from the form of art. He wants us to choose to care. He knits a line from Marilynne Robinson into a brief appraisal of Dorothea Lange, and then, after all of this, he stands back and informs us that “We are in important ways the sum of the places we have walked.”

(Where have we walked?)

Which leaves those of us who have gone a handful of years without the sight of something new, those of us who have been walking with familiar dust upon our shoes, those of us who have felt the perimeters of our lives squeezing in, squeezing tight, grateful for the ambulation of this book, the places we have traveled through it, the pause that it has pressed upon the beginning, and now the end, of the afternoon.

◊◊◊

Beth Kephart is the author of more than two-dozen books in multiple genres, an adjunct teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and the co-founder of Juncture Workshops. Her essays appear in Ninth Letter, Catapult, Literary Hub, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere, and a new memoir in essays, Wife|Daughter|Self is due out in spring 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

 

 

 

 

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Published on September 3, 2019 in art book reviews, nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

BALTHUS: A BIOGRAPHY by Nicholas Fox Weber reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 22, 2014 by thwackJune 18, 2020
Balthus book jacket; two men talking

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BALTHUS: A BIOGRAPHY
by Nicholas Fox Weber
Dalkey Archive Press, 656 pages

reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

When looking at the paintings of Balthus, the viewer can’t help but react. Seeing paintings of young and often pre-pubescent girls and women in poses loaded with a strange sexuality, there is no possibility of cool remove. The viewer is made to consider actively their role in looking at the young women in these sometimes cruel, always compelling, provocative and often beautiful images. Balthus’s images have a strange, almost dreamlike hold, as they look back at us, impenetrable and confrontational. Balthus himself is somewhere in them yet distant. He wished his life to be separate from his work, something to be never included in exhibits or official publications, only “a misleading and harmful screen placed between the viewer and painter…paintings do not describe or reveal a painter.” He almost entirely obscured the true facts of his life, recreating himself as a count and rendering himself a challengingly elusive subject for biography. He placed the most responsibility on those looking at his work to react to whatever sexuality or darkness they might find in the work as their own perception.

The relationship of the work and the man and the simple question of what about Balthus continues to compel and scare us pervade Balthus: A Biography by Nicholas Fox Weber, recently re-released by Dalkey Archive. To dismiss Balthus’s work and our interest in it as being for its prurient content alone seems a disservice. Though at the beginning of his career he did, in his own telling, aim to shock, in later works such as “Girl at a Window” there is a great sense of beauty and a far different tone. Weber shows Balthus’s brother’s paintings and drawings of similar subject matter that come devoid of the elegance and interest of Balthus’s work. There is unquestionably something peculiarly un-nerving in Balthus’s traditional paintings, made often in the style of far older painters such as Piero della Francesca. Even the subject matter is not unprecedented.

thérèse-dreaming-1938 painting

Thérèse Dreaming, 1938

Recently, walking through the Clark Museum, I found myself facing a delicately painted canvas by Renoir of a girl in stasis, sleeping with a cat upon her lap—precisely the subject upon which Balthus would fixate, almost unceasingly, for his career. A similar Balthus, “Thérèse Dreaming,” shows a girl, her head leaning back and her legs spread apart, as a cat drinks milk. In this canvas, there is none of the calm of the Renoir but a feeling of uncomfortable voyeurism, harshness amid the beauty. The most difficult moments in Weber’s book are the all-too-believeable descriptions of Balthus’s difficult and torturously controlling encounters with his models. As Weber correctly notes, in the art of Balthus, “the central act is dreaming and desiring.”

Girl at a Window, 1955 (Painting)

Girl at a Window, 1955

Balthus was an artist of surfaces. Francis Bacon is quoted in the book with perhaps the most perceptive appraisal of Balthus’s work, noting his work in redecorating the Villa Medici in Rome and re-doing the walls. Balthus was a designer of stage sets as well as an artist who painted canvases. His work was often about traditional exteriors and appearance, at a time when so many artists were moving toward expressive technique. His almost unceasingly consistent subject matter might have also offered him a way to have great focus on painting while allowing variation through the repeated subjects of these young girls that he found “amusing.” This distance is part of what makes the work of Balthus so distressing and powerful for the viewer.

Balthus himself proves similar to his paintings, both accessible and elusive, a constant contradiction. He allows Weber to conduct interviews while obscuring his biography and creating new and fantastic narratives of his own. Through years of interaction Weber manages to find the true life of Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola that ends up being, as most lives are, all too mundane and expected. He finds himself surprisingly connected to the man as he tries to approach his work and life critically. This forces some repetition of similar arguments, for just as Balthus’s work was repetitive so this book must be, but allows for some quite revealing moments and interesting analysis of the work, showing all the more clearly Balthus’s prodigious skill as a painter. Fittingly the book becomes not a simple biography of the artist but also a story of Weber’s tumultuous relationship with the artist, much like the relationship we have with the work, moving quickly from love to distaste for this work that, Weber writes of one painting, “had left me no room for escape.” While Balthus’s life, much like his work, may not always be easy to take, it is also often fascinating.


Author Photo of Gabriel Chazan

Gabriel Chazan, a filmmaker and writer, is from Toronto, Canada. He is a student at Sarah Lawrence College studying film history, art history and poetry and will be studying at Oxford University this coming year. He writes on film at Home Movies: The Sarah Lawrence Film Journal.

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Published on August 22, 2014 in art book reviews, nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

I COULD SEE EVERYTHING: THE PAINTINGS OF MARGAUX WILLIAMSON reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on July 14, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
I Could See Everything by Margaux Williamson

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I COULD SEE EVERYTHING: THE PAINTINGS OF MARGAUX WILLIAMSON
by Margaux Williamson
Coach House Books, 164 pages

reviewed by Gabriel Chazan 

There’s something otherworldly about the actress Scarlett Johansson. Earlier this year she played an alien in Under The Skin and, in one of the most striking paintings in the artist Margaux Williamson’s new book, I Could See Everything, she plays the universe. The painting, called I thought I saw the whole universe, is a portrait of Johansson—or more precisely the infinite landscape represented by her wearing Versace for The New York Times. The dress is hypnotic, with what seems like a galaxy in the center. The dress becomes covered in shimmering stars and triangles. Something approaching the vastness of the universe can be seen emerging in Scarlett Johansson’s absented figure and the dress, from this magazine page. This is even further eclipsed in the later painting study: universe in which the figure is entirely taken away to show only this vast space. Looking through Williamson’s book, I found myself thinking of the Canadian landscape painters in the Group Of Seven. Like the Group of Seven and more contemporary artists like Peter Doig, Williamson brings us landscapes from the Canadian world: the stars beyond the dress of Johansson in the paper, a bar full of rainbows, the cave of her own hair as well as her living room and kitchen. I found myself wondering: would Tom Thompson be painting this now?

I thought I saw the whole universe (Scarlett Johansson in Versace)

I thought I saw the whole universe (Scarlett Johansson in Versace)

Williamson places her artwork in an imagined gallery, The Road At The Top of The World Museum, not so insignificantly located in the Yukon, near the landscapes so famously painted by Thompson and other painters in the Group of Seven. As art critic Chris Kraus writes in a interesting short essay included in the book, the paintings of Williamson here “become iconic simply because they’re dreamt by the same person.” These various signifiers (landscape, celebrity, constellations) are here because they reside in Williamson’s imagination. Another one of my favorite of Williamson’s paintings here, Back, before, when me and Leonardo DiCaprio were homeless, places Williamson next to a brooding version of the young actor on a bohemian couch, amid a black background flickering white, again shifting into a constellation or out of a dream. There is no attempt from Williamson to bring DiCaprio or even her exhibit into palpable reality but rather into dreamt constellations.

margaux-williamson_back-before-when-me-and-leonardo-600

Back, before, when me and Leonardo DiCaprio were homeless

The role of the painter, perhaps even more than that of the curator now, may be to create constellations. Williamson’s images, through their inclusion in the created arrangement for this book, are given the chance to be encountered in relationship to each other, rather than floating online. There is recognition of the transience of our relationship to artworks now in Williamson’s choice to present these paintings in a book (as well as a brief exhibition at Mulherin + Pollard Gallery in New York). Our first encounter with artworks now can be said to come not in small galleries in the Lower East Side, but in the reproduction, the image abstracted from context. Many will have first encountered Williamson in a novel, Sheila Heiti’s wonderful How Should A Person Be, about a constellation of friends in Toronto. By choosing to place her exhibit in this imagined place at the top of the world, Williamson allows us to see this constellation of work—everything—in the way that recognizes the capability of art to be dreamt not just by the artist but also by the viewer. We visit this gallery and immerse ourselves in it as we do a location in a novel. We remember our visit to a place we have never been.


Gabriel Chazan

Gabriel Chazan, a filmmaker and writer, is from Toronto, Canada. He is currently studying film history, filmmaking and poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. He writes on film at Home Movies: The Sarah Lawrence Film Journal.

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Published on July 14, 2014 in art book reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

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