I  have been reading Kafka in anticipation of our trip to Prague at the end of this month. Maybe it is just an excuse to reread him. I bought a Modern Library edition of his selected stories at Tim's Used Books in Provincetown on our vacation. I read some there; I am reading more now that I am home. For me and my tastes and predilections "The Metamorphosis" is still the best of what he produced in his short lifetime, followed by "Investigations of a Dog." Both are brilliant, but the brevity of "The Metamorphosis," along with the rest of its attributes, makes it what I would call a masterpiece.

I found I was able to read it on several levels. First, it is a study in denial. Everyone sees what has happened to Gregor and he himself sees it all too well, but refuses to believe it can't be fixed or dealt with. Since I read it in Ptown, surrounded by gay men who have come out to their families and the world, I saw it, secondly, as a story of the consequences of revealing one's true self. In coming out of his room, Gregor has in essence made an announcement about himself. Sometimes that means freedom, fulfillment, bliss. In this case, the family is aghast, and repulsed. He cannot help it. What he is, is not within his control. But they cannot overcome their disgust. He is a threat. He must be stopped, and so, in a perverse original-sin kind of moment, the father throws that apple at him. Third, and contrarily, I see it as a story of an attempted escape. In turning into some kind of insect -- not exactly a cockroach -- Gregor has released himself of the responsibility of supporting his entire, parasitic family. It is his means of breaking free from that reality, which has become untenable. Unfortunately, in doing so, he loses that one "wild and precious life" of his. Fourth, and finally, I see "The Metamorphosis" as a story about the capacity of humans to rationalize. It is an often cruel and powerful intellectual weapon. The Samsa family rationalizes their rejection of burdensome Gregor. It's better this way. He'll understand. Ironically, and terrifyingly, Gregor himself buys into the idea. The apple injury has compromised him; he may well have survived it, except that his final act is to will himself to death, to accommodate them, having professed his (thoroughly unrequited) love for his monstrous father, mother, and sister. After he is gone, they get jobs -- they support themselves for a change -- and the sister looks like a good marriage prospect! All is rosy. They have blossomed, thanks to the sacrificial Gregor.

These themes can all be filed under the category of "The Human Condition."  Kafka's other overriding theme is the life of the artist -- The Artist's Condition, you could say. “The Hunger Artist”  is in particular about the sacrifices of living the creative life. So is “Investigations of a Dog,” for that matter. As the canine narrator says: “Solitary and withdrawn, with nothing to occupy me save my hopeless but, as far as I am concerned, indispensable little investigations, that is how I live.”  Yup.

​That story, as good as it is, is a bit belabored, though. I think it's the reason why "The Metamorphosis" is the signature Kafka story, and not "Investigations."

We have tentatively planned to go to the Kafka Museum when we are in Prague. We wonder if it will be too depressing. But there is so much humor in Kafka, Czech humor, I guess. Woody Allen, a New York-style humorist, was certainly influenced by Kafka. I am thinking of, for example, "The Kugelmass Episode," his short story whose ground situation is that Kugelmass, a City College humanities professor, is repeatedly projected into the plot of Madame Bovary, where he has an affair with Emma. It gets complicated when Emma is transported with him back to New York. (Be careful what you wish for.) It ends with him having been inserted into another book -- an old textbook, Remedial Spanish -- and "running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener ("to have") -- a large and hairy irregular verb -- raced after him on its spindly legs." Now that's a metamorphosis.

"I am not a designer."

That is the clever subtitle of the retrospective of the work of Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) that had its preview last night at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. The rest of the statement, which Noguchi made in 1949, is: "The word design implies catering to the quixotic fashion of the time." He wanted nothing to do with that. And yet of course he was a designer, of tables, chairs, and, perhaps most famously, lighting. "Everything is sculpture," he once said, equally enigmatically. "Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture." He was indeed a sculptor himself. He was also the creator of theatrical sets, notably for Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring, and outdoor architectural spaces, all of which he called, again enigmatically, "gardens" -- never mind that there is nary a blade of grass growing in some of those landscapes. 

He was, said PEM's acting director and CEO, Kurt T. Steinberg, "not interested in staying in his lane."

Beautifully designed, with lighting and a color scheme right out of Mad Men -- or, as two women we met at the reception afterwards said, The Dick Van Dyke Show -- the show features more than 200 objects, as well as a film showing some of Noguchi's playgrounds, along with a video of modern dancer Ruth Page (1899-1991) in a sack-like costume he designed for her. A re-creation of the dress is in the show, too, as is a re-creation of the Appalachian Spring set, including a very stylized rocking chair set on a minimalist front  porch.

Bob and I, for our part, were physically and sentimentally thrust back into his parents' mid-century-modern milieu -- Bob's circa 1956 childhood home, designed here in Andover, Massachusetts, by an acolyte of Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus movement. We agreed that his father would have loved the show, including the design elements that he "borrowed" from Noguchi for some of the plexiglas tables he designed for AKKO (pronounced ah-koh), the company he founded in his retirement.

Unafraid to be commercial, Noguchi controversially displayed some of his everyday objects when he was chosen to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale in 1986. A man without a political agenda, he nonetheless went to Hiroshima to work on a memorial to those killed in the WWII devastations. He also asked and was granted permission to live in a Japanese internment camp, hoping to see for himself how to make life better for those who were interned. He wasn't accepted by the residents, however; free to go, or not be there in the first place, this son of a Japanese father and a mother of Irish descent wasn't one of them. And when he realized that the U.S. government would never implement the improvements he might propose, he left.

He was an  outsider  -- never a bad situation for an artist. Or maybe that lifelong status was the reason he became an artist in the first place. His father, a writer in Los Angeles, was not involved in his upbringing. His mother, thinking her son should absorb Japanese culture, moved with him from the U.S. when he was eight to Chigasaki, then Yokohama. He did not fit in.  “I became a stranger to myself, a stranger in the land," he once said. At age thirteen, he was sent back to the U.S., alone, to attend the Interlaken School, a progressive boarding school located on Silver Lake near Rolling Prairie, Indiana. The philosophy of its founder, Edward Rumely, was reflected in the school's motto: "Knowledge through Experience." The curriculum was hands-on, active learning, and he thrived.

The show was curated by a feisty team: Monica Obniski of the High Museum in Atlanta, Marin R. Sullivan, an independent art historian and curator, and PEM's R. Ruthie Dibble and Lan Morgan. A feat of both organizational and creative skills, "Isamu Noguchi: 'I am not a designer'" presents all sides of a very complex, sometimes contradictory individual, immersing us in his world at a time when the opportunity to escape our own is particularly welcome.

             There’s something to be said, when you’re getting ready to fledge, for encountering someone—in fact, being more or less mentored by someone—who is suffering a temporary lull in their own career. It’s less intimidating. That’s the main benefit. It can, however, cause a youthful smugness, temporary to be sure, but isn’t all smugness temporary? If not, it should be.
    In my case, that someone was a fifty-four-year-old man named Stanley Foster Reed, although he went by variations of that name, for example, the nom de plume Foster Seelye Nader, which he both used as a byline for his own stories and put on the masthead of his magazine. He put my name on the masthead, too, and under it the glorified title of editorial assistant, the better for it to look as if he had a full staff working for him at this time in his tumultuous personal and financial history.
    The magazine was a quarterly called Mergers & Acquisitions: The Journal of Corporate Venture. It had been a brilliant idea when Stanley had founded the quarterly at the start of the decade-long mergers-and-acquisitions trend in 1965. By the time I got there in 1973, M&A had lost many of its subscribers, who either had found other ways to learn about which businesses were buying and selling what or else had sensed that the trend was waning. That year also was the start of the 1970s recession, a period of economic stagnation in much of the Western world that essentially ended the post-World War II economic boom that had allowed my parents to get a toehold in the middle class and send me and my older sister to college. As a result, facing mounting losses, Stanley had moved his offices from downtown Washington, D.C., to the basement of his house in McLean, Virginia.
    That’s where I, as a college senior, had been interviewed by Stanley—he, dressed in a short, white, terry-cloth bathrobe, purportedly because he had forgotten I was coming; me, in the black knit dress I had worn at my roommate’s wedding—and been hired to make sense out of his chaotic files, clip news of mergers, acquisitions, and sell-offs from piles of the Wall Street Journal and other sources, and type his longhand manuscripts. The date of the interview is easy to remember. It was my twenty-first birthday, December 19, 1972. I had been driven out to McLean by my boyfriend in his roommate’s MGB. He was waiting patiently at curbside for however long it might take. (Reader, I married him—a year and three days later.) There had been an initial interview a couple of weeks earlier, with a guy, perhaps in his early thirties, who turned out to be a congressman’s son—he, too, down on his luck—who had said I seemed a good fit for the job but that I needed to come back to be interviewed by Stanley. For that first interview, I had ridden my ten-speed bike, in the rain. The distance was nine miles from my dorm room, I recently checked on Google Maps, but even if, back then, I had realized how far away it was, I doubt I wouldn’t have made the journey. Ah, youth.
    The position at the magazine had been advertised in the classifieds of my college newspaper, The Hatchet. (This was George Washington University, and along the same lines, the yearbook was called The Cherry Tree.) Although I was majoring in journalism, I had never written for The Hatchet and did not aspire to. In reporting class, for writing in-class assignments, we were each given a single sheet of yellow paper to roll into a manual typewriter bolted to a desk. We were supposed to start typing a draft, make corrections as we went along or afterwards when we pulled the paper out of the machine. But I didn’t write like that. I did not save trees—quite the contrary. I wrote rough drafts and then more drafts, correcting, typing, and retyping. I even wrote drafts of letters home.
    More my style was the assignment to keep a journal for my American Autobiography class, whose excellent syllabus included Lillian Helman’s An Unfinished Woman, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. For one journal entry I wrote of a long, cold series of subway rides that I took from Grand Central Station to visit a college friend in Forest Hills over Christmas vacation. There we paid a call unannounced to the classroom of her former high-school English teacher—I’ll call him Mr. Irving. When he saw my friend, he said one word, “Chinese?” So began my first encounter with egg rolls, wonton soup, and all the rest of it. Having grown up in an Italian-American family, I feared the eating of Chinese food in restaurants or otherwise.
    We went to Mr. Irving’s  apartment afterwards. It was empty of furniture. He was going through a divorce, and apropos of that, he told us a story about having had sexual relations with his neighbor and being so bored by it that, as I wrote in my American Autobiography class journal, “he fell asleep while still inserted in her.” At the time, I hadn’t found it untoward for a high-school teacher to be imparting such information to his former student and her friend. I also didn’t realize it was somewhat untoward for me to write such a thing for my college professor. There’s the difference between youth and experience.
    By my first day on the job at Stanley’s, the congressman’s son was no longer working there. He later came to my dorm room to try selling me cleaning products. Feeling sorry for him, I bought a box of laundry detergent for $5, for me a princely sum. Once, flat broke, I had asked my sister to send me that very amount in the mail from her own college in Baltimore. I was on the meal plan and would not have starved without it, but I desperately needed it for another essential of mine at the time: cigarettes. She did promptly send it in an envelope on which she hand-wrote my dorm’s address. The trouble was, it went first to Washington, North Carolina. Because my sister’s way of writing a D looked like an N, it was a very long wait for that picture of Lincoln.
    Since I still had college classes to attend, papers to write, and exams to take before my graduation, the work at Stanley’s was part-time at variable hours and, need I say, not well paid. I can see by my Social Security tally all these years later, I earned a total of $58 a week. I don’t remember the hourly rate that the sum represents, but I do recall that the pay checks were issued by Stanley irregularly.
    For a short time I had driven my VW bug to get there. That was why I felt I was able to take the job in the first place. My father had bought the car from a neighbor for a dollar. I had driven it in high school. Over Christmas he and my mother agreed to let me drive it from Connecticut back to college and to use it to get to the job. They probably thought the position represented the beginning of the end of their being in charge of me, which it did. I’d never had much guidance from either of them, and hadn’t asked for it. I had chosen my own college, written my college essay in longhand in pink Flair pen without showing it to them or anyone. I had gone to my college orientation by myself, despite the fact that the summer weekend had been designed for both students and parents. I took the train to Union Station, riding in the smoking car with a number of unpleasant drunks. When I arrived in D.C., I struggled with my suitcase in the days when suitcases had no wheels. I remember how big the eyes of a certain lithe youth’s grew when he saw the bills in my hand. I had taken them out to give him a tip for carrying that cumbersome suitcase to the curbside for me. I had not intended all of the bills to be his. Witnessing the grab and run, the driver sitting behind the wheel of his taxi just shook his head. He had seen the likes of me before.
    I parked the car on the street near my dorm. Driving to Stanley’s one morning I was quickly surrounded by D.C. police cars. A similar VW bug had been stolen, but not this one. On my way home another time, I lightly rear-ended the car in front of me and we locked bumpers. I stood and jumped on them to get us loose and apart—naturally in the rain. Another time, after work was done for the day, Stanley had offered us some wine and cheese. I didn’t realize the wine had hit me until on the way home when I ran a red light on Georgetown’s M Street and almost hit a motorcyclist. “You missed me that time!” he shouted, shaking his fist. Like the cab driver, he, too, recognized a familiar figure.
    That car was trouble. I was better off on my bike. My parents, even though I never told them these stories, realized it, too, when the car needed a tuneup they were unwilling to pay for. A short time later, my father flew down and retrieved it. I tried not to think that its throwing a rod in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel was payback.
    Wanting to keep my job, I resorted to my bike and the harrowing, helmet-less commute to Stanley’s. The route took me from my dorm in Foggy Bottom, along the Georgetown canal towpath, across Chain Bridge, and up a giant hill. The giant hill, downward, on the way home was the harrowing part, during which I had the realization that there’s confidence and then there’s recklessness. Early one morning on the towpath I saw a car parked up ahead. I had never seen a car on the towpath before. I had no idea how it got there. As I pedaled closer and closer, I saw men, two or three or them, emerge. Workmen, I supposed, until they wobbled. Were the drunk? Had they slept all night in their car? As I drew closer and closer, their arms reached out and lunged for me. I swerved and pedaled harder than I had ever pedaled in my life. When I got to Chain Bridge, a policeman was standing century, manipulating the traffic light to regulate the cars in rush hour. I told him what had happened and what almost had. I don’t think he even looked at me, so intent was he on manipulating that light. Yet now as I recall it, it seems so much like a dream, men moving at me in slow motion, the unfazed cop, I have to wonder if it happened at all.
    Stanley, medium tall, perhaps once handsome, but now sporting a bit of pudginess, was literally more bearish than bullish. His smallish eyes were close-set, wary, weary, behind his horn-rimmed glasses. Most of all, he was the kind of middle-aged guy who liked to hold forth. It didn’t really matter what the topic was—he liked to talk—but his favorite topic was himself, on good behavior, bad, or otherwise. For example, he told us he had once thrown a teapot against the brick wall in his dining room, where we at that moment were having the lunch he had prepared. Was it a threat? To me at the time the story seemed purely entertainment.
    That “we” at the dining table included two other young women. One was Kathy, Stanley’s long-suffering managing editor, who did the hard work of getting the magazine out, who taught me what I needed to know to do my job correctly, and who rarely smiled. The other was a soft-spoken, single mother named Betsy from Arlington, Virginia, by way of Richmond, who was Stanley’s bookkeeper. Occasionally, too, at the lunch table there was an old geezer hired by Stanley to make cold calls in pursuit of new subscriptions. Once when he saw me pull up in my VW, he jumped out of the way in fake alarm, as if to say, or perhaps he did say, “Whoa! Woman driver!”
    In those days I wasn’t eating regular meals. Stanley was a good cook, but to be fair, pure hunger is a big reason why those lunches were so memorable. And it was a hunger felt all the more keenly after the nine-mile bike ride. Sharing food is a classic bonding experience and I doubt I would remember this episode in the early life of my professional career if that sharing hadn’t happened. Mr. Irving, my college friend, and I had shared a meal, but none of us had cooked it.
    Stanley invariably served us his simple, pinto bean soup, which he made with rendered fatback. There was no recipe. As he explained it, he just kept adding to the soup pot—more beans, more fatback, and other bits of flavorful leftovers from his other meals. He claimed that some such soups had been kept going for years. I had never heard of fatback. Betsy knew all about it. The South was closer than I thought. In fact, I was in the midst of it, I had been realizing more and more, ever since I first experienced D.C. over that weekend orientation. We also had Caesar salad made by Stanley in the traditional way, starting with a clove of bruised garlic rubbed into the bottom of the wooden salad bowl and ending with scattered croutons that he had made from odd ends of old bread.
    By then, his wife wasn’t much on the scene. At least, I never saw her. By this time, she must have had quite enough of him. He was the father of three daughters, but they were gone by then, too. I heard only about one daughter, who was studying comparative literature at Princeton. He was wistfully very proud of her.
    When spring came, Stanley gave us a treat for lunch. He cooked shad roe on a plank in his backyard and we ate at the picnic table, probably just as he and his intact family once had done. On another day in spring, the termites swarmed. Although McLean is known to be a pricey D.C. suburb, Stanley’s house was nothing special, a mid-twentieth-century split level. The basement had sliding glass doors that opened out onto the backyard. As Stanley stood in the doorway of the room where Kathy and I worked, the little winged things were all over him, as if he were some kind of saint of the termites. I got up and fled as he laughed at the spectacle—the termites, himself covered with them, me fleeing. When I returned the next day, they were gone.
    Except for that one-time, after-work wine, we didn’t ordinarily drink at Stanley’s, but thanks to him, I attended my first wine tasting, at Washington’s International Club. Both my husband-to-be and I were asked by Stanley to assist him at this gala affair that featured perhaps twenty-four tables offering samples. But I don’t remember doing anything much except tasting and afterwards being rewarded with a carton of various wines to take home. Stanley was invited to my husband-to-be’s apartment afterwards, where we smoked pot and danced to an album by America. Stanley impressed us by snapping his fingers, rhythmically stomping his feet, throwing his head back, and shouting “Hey!” tango-style. There were other people there, too, but who were they? Kathy? Betsy? Bob’s roommate, Paul? All I remember is that until it was discarded, Paul vociferously complained on political grounds about the presence of the South African sherry included in that carton of wine.
    Some days before the wine tasting, Stanley had offered me a full-time job after graduation and I had accepted it. The trouble was, I had, on the heels of it, received a better offer from another magazine, whose subject was, of all things, model airplanes. In fact, it was a clutch of three such magazines designed for hobbyists, junior hobbyists, and hobby stores that catered to the first two categories. Stanley’s offer had been an annual salary of $6000. I had just rented an apartment above a Greek restaurant on Georgetown’s M Street and moved out of the dorm early to claim it, a month before graduation. Up two long flights of stairs, I carried my bike on my shoulder to this two-room, $170-a-month flat that would have eaten nearly a third of that income—before taxes. The job at the other magazine paid $7000, offered health insurance, and promised a $500 raise after six months. Plus it was in downtown D.C., a much easier commute from my new apartment and not in somebody’s basement.
    Stanley had left behind his trench coat on the couch of that apartment. I brought it with me to McLean the next afternoon, when I planned to tell him that I would be taking the other job instead of the one he had offered. To my complete surprise, he had already heard the news. He was on the board of the publisher who had hired me, and they had enjoyed embarrassing him at their board meeting that morning by telling him that they had stolen me away from him.
    I was unbothered by his sputtering claim that I would be labeled a “job hopper.” Coolly I replied, “Well, I just won’t mention you on my resume. No one will even know that I ever worked here.” Where does such confidence, such gall, come from? Kathy, who had worked for him downtown but who, after the move to the basement, had dusted off her resume, was leaving, too, but surely she had been able to make her plans known to him more graciously.
    At my job at the so-called Potomac Aviation Publications, I learned to proofread, copy edit, and prepare a manuscript for a typesetter—useful skills—but the place did not play fair.  Although I got my $500 raise, the management dragged its feet on signing me up for the health insurance. After my marriage, I got on my husband’s plan, but a resentment lingered. I grew dissatisfied, grumpy, and exasperated, especially when one of the editors sent me a Christmas card that quoted a line from “The Second Coming” and attributed it to someone whose name he spelled “Yates.” I had taken the job in May; I left it in February. And perhaps it was no coincidence that in the same month my first freelance magazine article, which I had sold in 1973 while still in college, finally appeared in print and I received my first payment for professional writing. I would have had to leave anyway, in a short while. The company was moving to Colorado Springs, where the editors who were still flying model airplanes could do so with more ease.
    As for me, in years to come, I would for a time specialize in writing short stories that featured rude awakenings. A series of them was lying in wait for me. And it would be many more years before I experienced anything even remotely like that youthful, temporary smugness again.

      I take photos of John Henry Twachtman's paintings whenever I see them at museums, but when I get them home and look at them on my computer screen I find that there's no there there. One has to experience them in person. That's why I didn't bother to make the images in this commentary not much bigger than thumbnails. Larger wouldn't do any good.
     These two works of his are Country House in Winter, Cos Cob and Hemlock Pool (left to right), owned by the Addison Gallery of American Art here in Andover. I have seen them many times, mostly recently yesterday afternoon. Both were painted in Greenwich, just a couple of years before the artist's death in 1902. If I were a collector type and if I had the money, Twachtman's paintings are what I would collect. It's because they capture the exact, hazy light of Greenwich in winter that I remember from my childhood, specifically when I was playing outdoors, often sledding on the golf course behind our house, on what we kids from the neighborhood called Suicide Hill. We trudged through the snow to get there. Boys rode toboggans. We girls had our Flexible Flyers. We would be out there for hours. I don't remember getting hungry or cold. We were too absorbed in the play, and the fear, since going down that hill was a slightly dangerous activity, especially when a train of sleds and toboggans went down in a line together. I experienced more than one crash at the bottom. When we had the tag sale after the family house on Morningside Drive was sold, someone remarked with sadness and a bit of a reprimand that my sled was part of it. Yes, it was. No one had used it in decades, and that was the least of what we were letting go that day.
       I didn't know at first why those Twachtman paintings gripped me. Soon I noticed that other winter scenes painted in other parts of the country, or even in other parts of New England, didn't have that same "certain Slant of light." Emily Dickinson noted the slant in her part of Massachusetts, out in Northampton. On "Winter Afternoons --," she wrote, it  "oppresses, like the Heft/Of Cathedral Tunes -– "

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -–
We can find no scar,
But internal difference -–
Where the Meanings, are -–

None may teach it –- Any –-
'Tis the seal Despair –-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –-

When it comes, the Landscape listens –-
Shadows –- hold their breath –-
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –-
​
      Twachtman claimed in a letter to a fellow painter to have loved nature in winter, and he painted winter scenes for a significant part of his life, particularly after his move to Greenwich, where he bought a seventeen-acre parcel on Round Hill in the back country, far from Cos Cob, where several of his painter-friends lived. Dickinson's poem is unambiguous on the connection between winter and death--just as Joyce was in "The Dead." But I don't think of death when I look at Country House or Hemlock Pool. I think of life.
        

A Woman of Her Time: Coco Chanel Sings, a song cycle by my friend the composer Scott Wheeler, premiered at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., in February of 2025. I just watched it on YouTube, and was captivated.  Where to begin? It starts so simply, even frivolously, but by the end, we are convinced that Coco is a woman of all time, not just her own. Art vs. Fashion. Men vs. Women. Art vs. Entertainment. Where does one begin and the other end? Does an artist entertain at his or her peril? Or is a mix of the two necessary for any successful engagement with an audience? And oh, does this piece have an awareness of its audience! That's so much a part of its charm: that engagement. The direct address. (And what a fun surprise when that connection is broken when soprano Katherine Lerner Lee speaks directly to the maestro for one moment!) She is so coy, seductive, but also so honest and self aware. She begins as an innocent, naive -- words reprised in the piece to great effect. By the end, she has learned, grown, changed, while retaining the characteristics that made her uniquely Coco. It's hard to believe this piece is only thirty minutes long. So many moods created, so many chapters, an entire life story told. I love the rhymes, never obvious, then when, after the anticipation, they are delivered, they are so right. Quaint/saint. Huit/eat. There is lots of humor: e.g., her first bad reviews came from her mother, saying she was a bad girl! This is balanced by the seriousness: the occupation of France during the Nazi era and her liaison with the enemy. Her retort is Biblical. How about your own morals? Bravo! I didn't know Coco's story until now. And I do believe fashion is a serious subject (hats, handbags, hemlines, and all). If anyone were in doubt, I would suggest they see the Apple TV series La Maison. Or else they should have a listen and look at A Woman of Her Time.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79w7wmXTTpY

     I became aware of Ruth Osawa (1926-2013) in May of the year she died, when I watched a circa 1990 work of hers, made of crocheted oxidized copper wire, sell at Skinner in Boston to an internet bidder for $73,800. The piece resembles a series of nested wire egg-baskets, each of the smaller ones visible through the lacy mesh of the others. But the forms are not separate. The untitled work, known by its number, S.069/90, is one continuous shaped copper wire. “She learned this technique while on a trip to Mexico in 1947,” Skinner art department head Robin Starr told me. “She had studied at Black Mountain College with Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller, so she was thinking about materials that were common but unusual for an artist to use. When she saw some women weaving egg baskets out of wire, that was her ‘aha!’ moment.” Two days before the Skinner sale, another of the artist’s untitled wire sculptures, numbered S.108, fetched $1,443,750 at Christie’s in New York City. What made the difference? Size. Skinner sold a “little guy,” in Starr’s phrase, measuring just 6¼" tall with a 13½" diameter. The Asawa that was sold by Christie's for what was then a record price was 137” x 23” x 23”.
       That large piece may be one of those pictured above, in a publicity shot for Asawa's retrospective,  where I was lucky enough to see it at MoMA. There were some three hundred pieces arranged in several galleries in such a way that viewers could get up fairly close to them and inspect them. Bob and I both marveled at the sheer craft of them. How could that be one continuous wire? How did she, the mother of six children, and a social activist to boot, manage to be so prolific? A video played in one of the galleries, showing her working with children, helping them to form figures out of flour dough. She looked like any typical elementary school teacher.  Appearances deceive, just like her crocheted works of art.

      I have looked at Sargent's El Jaleo (1882) innumerable times at the Gardner Museum in Boston. For a time we owned a cheap reproduction (see my essay "Postcard Picassos"), so I have had even more exposure to it. I haven't looked closely at Archibald Motley Jr.'s Tongues (Holy Rollers) (1929), whose central figure in white, it is believed, may refer to Elder Lucy Smith, a famous Chicago faith healer -- even though the body type of Motley's dancer doesn't match Smith's hefty one. I took the above image of the painting at MoMA on our recent trip to NYC. I was attracted to it because of its revival theme, even though the depiction dates after the timeline of my current project, ​The Missionary Factory, which is 1808-1908. I intended to use it as a screensaver, so I could give it some scrutiny. As I was looking at it at MoMA, however, El Jaleo suddenly came to mind. In addition to the two white figures, there are also the complementary musicians. Did Motley do this consciously? Is it an homage?  Has anyone else noticed the compositional similarities? I wondered. AI instantly had the answer at least to my last question, delivering it blandly: "The two works are often compared for their dynamic portrayal of cultural and performance-based scenes, with Motley's work focusing on Black American spiritual experience and Sargent's on Spanish culture." Looking into it further, I discovered that art historian Valerie Mercer (pictured), curator and head of the General Motors Center for African American Art  at  the Detroit Institute of Arts, made the comparison in her catalog essay for the  exhibition "Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist," which I saw at the Whitney about ten years ago. I missed the likeness that time; not this time, probably because I had made a conscious effort to look more closely at fewer objects on my MoMA visit this time...

      We happened to be in NYC on election day, and passed by several polling places on our walks to various destinations, including Eataly. After the win, our friend Stephen Borkowski emailed us a photo of the candidate and one of his slogans: "I am running in the tradition of Shirley Chisholm, unbought and unbossed."  Whether or not he can deliver on his promises is a question to be answered; for now, it feels like something has happened, a change has occurred, an opportunity has presented itself.