Gayadas de Caliman13

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Friday, March 30, 2007

El ojo "picho" de García Márquez. 1976. La Jornada, Mexico.


La Jornada, Ciudad de Mexico.
La terrífica historia de un ojo morado
Por: Rodrigo Moya*
Publicado: Marzo 6, 2007



Archive Rodrigo Moya
Gabriel García Márquez, el 14 de febrero de 1976, luego del incidente con Mario Vargas Llosa Foto: Rodrigo Moya

Tal vez Gabriel García Márquez sea el más popular de los mortales, porque es asombrosa la cantidad de gente que en una reunión o fiesta cualquiera se refiere al escritor como ''el Gabo", como si lo conociera de toda la vida o fueran primos hermanos del premio Nobel.

Algunos hasta hablan de él como ''el Gabito", pero en más de una ocasión he descubierto a ciencia cierta que dicha familiaridad es ficticia, y que quienes lo tratan con tal confianza quizás lo han leído de cabo a rabo, pero nuca han cruzado una palabra con él.

Mi madre, Alicia Moreno de Moya, sí que podía referirse a Gabriel García Márquez y a Mercedes Barcha, su esposa, como amigos muy cercanos, y referirse a él como mi Gabito o Gabo de mi alma, y a Mercedes como Meche linda, o mijita linda, y en medio de cualquier diálogo soltar un ¡eh Ave María!, o unos más contundentes carajos y varios pendejos, que a veces eran de cariño, y a veces simplemente una especie de sustantivo o calificativo de difusas connotaciones.

Y es que Alicia era una colombiana de Medellín, una antioqueña de pura cepa, una auténtica paisa, como la definía el propio García Márquez.

El y Mercedes la querían como una de los mejores representantes de la colombianidad en México, por allá a principios de los años 60 del siglo pasado, cuando lo conocí en aquella casa de mi madre que era una especie de embajada paralela de Colombia en México, cuando la oficial estaba ocupada por los militares de la dictadura en turno.

En alguna de aquellas fiestas de intelectuales y artistas de destinos aún inciertos, el tal Gabo no me cayó muy bien que digamos. En plena reunión él se tendió en uno de los largos sofás, la cabeza apoyada en el brazo acodado, y desde esa posición como de marajá aburrido sostenía escuetos diálogos, o emitía juicios contundentes o frases entre ingeniosas y sarcásticas.

Estaban aún lejos Cien años de soledad y el premio Nobel, pero el paisano de mi madre se comportaba ya con una seguridad y cierta arrogancia intelectual que no a todos agradaba.

Poco después leí La hojarasca, y luego Relato de un náufrago, y El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, y todo lo que escribiría a lo largo de los siguientes casi 50 años, y entendí entonces porqué aquel tipo de bigote y gestos como de fastidio y pocas pero contundentes palabras como de frases célebres, podía recostarse en el sofá en medio de una ruidosa tertulia y decir lo que le viniera en gana.

Por aquellas tertulias en la casa materna fue que tuve cercanía amistosa con García Márquez, con Mercedes y sus hijos adolescentes, Rodrigo y Gonzalo. Yo sí tenía el derecho de llamarlo Gabo, pero nunca llegué a llamarlo Gabito, pues de alguna manera lo he visto como un gigante al que no le van los diminutivos. Siendo fotógrafo y amigo, no le pedí alguna vez que posara para mí, y cuantas veces los visité en su casa fue sin la cámara en el hombro. Ahora tal vez me arrepiento.

Por eso, fue natural que el 29 de noviembre de 1966 el Gabo apareciera por mi apartamento en los Edificios Condesa para que le tomara algunas fotografías para ilustrar la solapa o la contraportada del libro que había terminado después de dos años de trabajo, y estaba ya en manos de los editores.

Llegó acompañado de nuestro mutuo amigo Guillermo Angulo, quien había sido mi maestro, pero en esos años trabajaba como cónsul de Colombia en Estados Unidos. El saco que había escogido Gabo para aquella sesión era despampanante, y estuve tentado de sugerirle mejor una foto en camisa arremangada o prestarle una de mis chamarras, pero usaba la prenda con tal naturalidad que adiviné que la amaba y así las fotos se hicieron a su manera.

La foto era para Cien años de soledad, cuya edición se preparaba en Buenos Aires. Pero nadie sabía, quizás ni él mismo, lo que ese título significaría en la historia de la literatura.

Casi 10 años después, el 14 de febrero de 1976, Gabriel García Márquez volvió a tocar el timbre de mi casa, ya por distintos rumbos, en la colonia Nápoles, para que le tomara otras fotografías.

Esa vez lo notable no era el saco de cuadritos, sino el tremendo hematoma en el ojo izquierdo y una herida en la nariz, causada por el puñetazo que dos días antes le había propinado su colega y hasta ese momento gran amigo Mario Vargas Llosa.

El Gabo quería una constancia de aquella agresión, y yo era el fotógrafo amigo y de confianza para perpetuarla. Claro que pregunté azorado qué había pasado, y claro también que Gabo fue evasivo y atribuyó la agresión a las diferencias que ya eran insalvables en la medida que el autor de La guerra del fin del mundo se sumaba a ritmo acelerado al pensamiento de derecha, mientras que el escritor que 10 años después recibiría el premio Nobel, seguía fiel a las causas de la izquierda.

Su esposa Mercedes Barcha, quien lo acompañaba en aquella ocasión luciendo enormes lentes ahumados, como si fuera ella quien hubiera sufrido el derechazo, fue menos lacónica y comentó con enojo la brutal agresión, y la describió a grandes rasgos: En una exhibición privada de cine, García Márquez se encontró poco antes del inicio del filme con el escritor peruano. Se dirigió a él con los brazos abierto para el abrazo. ¡Mario...! Fue lo único que alcanzó a decir al saludarlo, porque Vargas Llosa lo recibió con un golpe seco que lo tiró sobre la alfombra con el rostro bañado en sangre.

Con una fuerte hemorragia, el ojo cerrado y en estado de shock, Mercedes y amigos del Gabo lo condujeron a su casa en el Pedregal. Se trataba de evitar cualquier escándalo, y el internamiento hospitalario no habría pasado desapercibido.

Mercedes me describió el tratamiento de bisteces sobre el ojo, que le había aplicado toda la noche a su vapuleado esposo para absorber la hemorragia. Es que Mario es un celoso estúpido, repitió Mercedes varias veces cuando la sesión fotográfica había devenido charla o chisme.

Según los comentarios que recuerdo de aquella mañana, mientras ambas parejas vivían en París los García Márquez habían tratado de mediar los disturbios conyugales entre Vargas Llosa y su esposa Patricia, acogiendo sus confidencias.

Como suele suceder, los consejos o comentarios de la pareja colombiana rebotaron hacia Vargas Llosa cuando éste volvió al redil y se reconcilió con su esposa.

Y lo que sea que se hubiese dicho o sucedido, el caso es que el peruano se sentía gravemente ofendido, y su furia la resolvió de aquella manera expedita y salvaje.

Guarda las fotos y mándame unas copias, me dijo el Gabo antes de irse. Las guardé 30 años, y ahora que él cumple 80 años, y 40 la primera edición de Cien años de soledad, considero correcta la publicación de este comentario sobre el terrífico encuentro entre dos grandes escritores, uno de izquierda, y otro de contundentes derechazos.

* Rodrigo Moya nació en Colombia en 1935 y se naturalizó mexicano. Es uno de los fotógrafos más importantes en la historia contemporánea. Entre su trabajo destaca la documentación de los movimientos guerrilleros, incluido un libro con material hasta aquel entonces inédito de fotografías del Che Guevara, y su colaboración con Salvador Novo en trabajos de crónica urbana

El ojo "picho" de García Márquez. 1976. The New York Times


BOOKS
García Márquez's Shiner Ends Its 31 Years of Quietude
By NOAM COHEN
Published: March 29, 2007



Archive Rodrigo Moya
Gabriel García Márquez in 1976 after Mario Vargas Llosa hit him.

The feud between the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, onetime best of friends, had all the elements of a literary classic: accusations of betrayal, jealousy and adultery, and a brutal encounter 31 years ago when things turned bloody.

What it had lacked, however, was a wealth of documentary evidence.

That all changed this month, with the publication of two black-and-white portraits taken on Valentine's Day, 1976, in Mexico City that show Mr. García Márquez with a shiner — in turns smiling and serious — two days after being slugged by Mr. Vargas Llosa. The writers are said not to have spoken to each other since the fight.

The Mexican newspaper La Jornada used the image of the smiling Mr. García Márquez as the cover of an issue created for his 80th birthday on March 6. Other newspapers in Latin America have followed suit, said the photographer Rodrigo Moya, who took both images and has recently been interviewed by radio stations in Argentina, Colombia and Chile.

"It's been a little overwhelming," Mr. Moya said by telephone in Spanish from Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he lives. "I have thousands of very good photos, but this one has generated so much interest due to the subject." Mr. García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, largely in recognition of his masterpiece "100 Years of Solitude."

Mr. Moya said that his friend Mr. García Márquez had asked him to take his portrait with a black eye. Though the photographs had never been published, Mr. Moya long ago had printed one for a friend who displayed it in his house. A journalist saw the photograph there and inquired about gaining permission to use it for his magazine, but they couldn't agree on terms, Mr. Moya said.

"Word got out that this photo existed, however," he said, "and I got a call from La Jornada, for which I have worked occasionally and with which I have a good relationship. I decided that sufficient time had passed."

The emergence of the photographs — after "30 years of solitude" as one French commentator put it — has given renewed interest to the events leading to the celebrated knockout. As a literary showdown, Mario Vargas Llosa vs. Gabriel García Márquez ranks with some of the most famous feuds, including Lillian Hellman vs. Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov vs. Edmund Wilson, and Norman Mailer vs. Gore Vidal. (When the encounter between Mr. Mailer and Mr. Vidal turned physical, if not bloody, Mr. Vidal is said to have responded from the floor, "Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.")

To accompany the photograph La Jornada asked Mr. Moya to write an essay, said Pablo Espinosa, the newspaper's culture news editor, because while "this story was very familiar to everybody, not everybody knew the particulars."

In his essay Mr. Moya sets the scene: a Mexico City movie theater packed with people attending the premiere of a film about the plane crash survivors in the Andes who turned to cannibalism.

At one point Mr. Vargas Llosa rushes up to Mr. García Márquez, who innocently tries to embrace him. Instead Mr. Vargas Llosa decks him, Mr. García Márquez's blood gushing everywhere.

Some had surmised that the fight may have been over politics, since Mr. García Márquez has always been on the left and Mr. Vargas Llosa at the time had begun to migrate to the right. (He later made an unsuccessful attempt to run for president of Peru in 1990 as a free marketeer.) But, as Mr. Moya explains, the cause was a woman, specifically, Mr. Vargas Llosa's wife, whom Mr. García Márquez consoled during a difficult period in the marriage.

While one of his photographs shows Mr. García Márquez in good spirits, Mr. Moya said that the immediate aftermath was grisly. "I took the picture two days after the incident, when he came to my house," he said. "It was difficult to take a picture in which he looked this good. I have some pictures in which he looks like he was really beaten up, like beaten up by the Mexican police."

Mr. Moya said he had not yet heard from Mr. García Márquez about the publication of the photographs. "We were good friends, but we've drifted apart," Mr. Moya said. "I live in Cuernavaca. He travels all over the world."

This week Mr. García Márquez is being honored in Colombia by the Fourth International Congress of the Spanish Language, which is meeting in Cartagena. A special 40th-anniversary edition of "100 Years of Solitude," which includes an introductory essay by Mr. Vargas Llosa in praise of the book, will be presented. He is said to have written it before the fight but has kept it out of print until recently.

As for his friend's motivations at the time, Mr. Moya said: "He is very meticulous and likes to document his life in different moments. He just had the idea that he wanted to have a picture with a black eye."

Eduardo Porter contributed additional reporting.

Venecia. La República de la Belleza. 828-1797


Art Review | 'Venice and the Islamic World'
The Republic of Beauty, Melding West and East
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: March 30, 2007



Musee de Louvre, Paris
Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797 This 1511 painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition shows the reception of Venetian ambassadors in Damascus.

Told often enough that the West and Islam are natural enemies, we start to believe it, and assume it has always been so. But the Metropolitan Museum of Art argues otherwise in "Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797," a show that, with classic Met largesse, recreates the spectacle of two different cultures meeting in one fantastic city, where commerce and love of beauty, those great levelers, unite them in a fruitful bond.

At its peak in the 15th and 16th centuries the Most Serene Republic of Venice was a giant, clamorous Costco-on-the-Rialto. All the necessities of life and most of the luxuries flowed into and through it from every direction, and in bulk, filling open-air stalls and salesrooms, piling up on piazzas.

Wood, metal, grain, furs and leathers from northern Europe were shipped from Venetian docks to Near Eastern and African cities, many formerly Christian and now Muslim controlled. In return came ultra-refined Islamic luxury goods: Turkish velvets, Egyptian glass, Transcaucasian carpets and Syrian brass work of a quality that matched and exceeded the finest of Europe. Although much of this retail kept moving westward into Italy and beyond, Venice skimmed off the cream to adorn its churches and merchant palaces. And so thoroughly did the city absorb the cultural essences of these imports that it gained a reputation for being the most un-European town in Europe: a floating, glinting pipe dream of a metropolis with a style and a story entirely its own.



Metropolitan Museum of Art
A mosque lamp from Egypt shows the influence of Venetian glass-making.

Visually the Met show, organized by Stefano Carboni, a curator in the department of Islamic art, presents Venice exactly this way. At the same time it acknowledges the tough entrepreneurial history running under the dazzle and glow.

The most famous early transaction between Venice and the Islamic world was not an exchange but a theft. In A.D. 828 two Venetian traders stole the body of St. Mark, the evangelist, from its tomb in Alexandria and brought it home with them.

The pretext was piety: to remove a revered Christian relic from Muslim hands. The rewards, however, were practical. With a single act of derring-do, Venice advertised its mercantile reach, reaffirmed its religious loyalties and gained a pilgrimage-worthy trophy saint to boot.

The accumulated chips would come in handy with the Vatican. In future centuries, when Europe was repeatedly forbidden by papal decree to do business with Muslim powers, Venice went right ahead, and got away with it, staying in touch with the larger world on which it depended for economic survival (it had no natural resources) and in which it took delight. That world is sketched out in the show's opening gallery.

A 15th-century navigational chart of the eastern Mediterranean defines its coordinates. A Venetian merchant's handwritten diary supplies some on-the-ground data. (In Egypt, for example, the merchant saw pyramids, giraffes and the interiors of elegant Muslim homes.) Two paintings, one large and one small, bring his experiences to life.

We see Venice itself in a 15th-century illustrated manuscript of Marco Polo's "Travels." A bird's-eye view, it is a mirage of crenelated rooftops, watered-silk lagoons and jumbo swans, with Marco Polo, festive in pink, about to embark for Persia. This is a storybook picture by an English artist who most likely never laid eyes on the city.

The Syrian city of Damascus looks far less outlandish in an oil painting done a century later of Venetian ambassadors being received at an Islamic court. Minus the minarets and towering turbans, this could be a European scene. Islamic culture was by this point as fully integrated into Venetian consciousness as Arabic words were into the local Italian dialect.

In a sense this entire show is an essay on how that integration played out in art. Sometimes the dynamic is straightforward, a simple matter of placement. An exquisitely illustrated 17th-century manuscript made in Shiraz, in Persia, ends up in Venice. Fragments of a painted Venetian glass beaker lie in a Jewish cemetery in Syria. How? Why? Things traveled; that's all.

Frequently, though, cultures are overlaid. The gold-patterned cloak worn by the Virgin in a 14th-century altarpiece by Stefano Veneziano is modeled on sumptuous textiles then entering Venice from Persia. This reference to a luxury import would surely have tickled the painting's merchant-patron. That the cloth depicted was "foreign" made it exotic enough for heaven.

Elsewhere the play of influence is more complex. One of the exhibition's oldest objects, a glass cup from the treasury of St. Mark's cathedral, has a multiethnic pedigree. Its emerald-green bowl was probably made by Islamic craftsmen in Egypt or Iran. It then traveled to Constantinople, where a Byzantine metalworker fitted it with a gilt-silver mount. Finally this cup that might well have had secular origins found a sacred home in Venice.

Original meanings were often lost in translation and new ones acquired. An inlaid brass bucket designed as a bath accessory in the Near East became a holy water dispenser in Venice. Showy silk brocades used as slipcovers in Turkey were tailored into ecclesiastical robes in Venice.

Nor was Europe always on the receiving end of such borrowings. Venetian glassmaking techniques and styles were so scrupulously emulated by Islamic craftsmen that it is often impossible to tell the source of specific objects. And some of the most magnetic items in the Met's exhibition were created by Western artists expressly for Islamic customers.

One of the most celebrated is Gentile Bellini's 1480 oil portrait of the Ottoman emperor Mehmet II. Commissioned during Bellini's two years in Constantinople, it turns an easily sensationalized subject into an empathetic likeness, idealizing but naturalistic, an approach that would have its effect on Islamic painting to come.



National Gallery, London
Gentile Bellini's portrait of the Ottoman ruler Mehmet II, painted in Constantinople.

For sensationalism, however, there is another portrait, an early-16th-century Italian print of Emperor Suleyman in a multitiered crown created, at fabulous expense, by Venetian goldsmiths. With its Carmen Miranda superstructure the headpiece was all but unwearable; and in the print the emperor, known as the Magnificent, seems to shrink comically within it.

Yet symbolically it meant a lot to him. He considered it an emblem of his sovereignty over all the tiara-wearing rulers of Europe. And he affirmed this entitlement, first by taking control of trade between Islam and the West, then by initiating an Ottoman conquest of the European territory.

As these threats became reality, the image of Muslims in European art changed. When the Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio painted a scene of the stoning of St. Stephen, he made all of the executioners Ottoman Turks. That was in 1520. Nine years later Suleyman's army reached the gates of Vienna.

Venice, pragmatic as always, put business before politics and tried to sustain a connection to the Ottoman court. But by then Venetian trade was in decline — Portugal had found a route to India; Spain had tapped into the New World — and Europe's relationship with Islam had irrecoverably soured. One of the show's final objects is a carved figurehead decoration for a 17th-century Venetian battleship used in war against the Ottomans. It depicts a Muslim, bare-headed, half-naked, humiliated, in chains.

But even when old commercial ties failed, a bond of beauty between Venice and the Islamic world held. So long and intimately had the two mingled that Venetian art had become, if only superficially, "Islamic" by default.

It's important to acknowledge the superficiality of the interaction, to remember that one culture never really became the other. The Met exhibition is a European, not an Islamic, show. Despite the Islamic material included we learn little about Islam or about the Islamic meaning of objects or, even in a general way, about Islamic views of the West.

Some future exhibition will flip this perspective around. That is a show we need, and I look forward to it. Perhaps Mr. Carboni, a scholar of depth and breadth, will do it. In the meantime we have his Met show to savor: historically pointed, visually magnificent and a timely demonstration of differences reconciled through art.

"Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797" continues through July 8 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.

Asher B. Durand. Hudson River School. 1796-1896


Art Review | 'Kindred Spirits'
Communing With Nature on a Grand Scale
By GRACE GLUECK
Published: March 30, 2007



Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Asher B. Durand's "Kindred Spirits" (1849) visits the Brooklyn Museum.

Although he was one of the greats of 19th-century American landscape painting and a founder of the Hudson River School, in the market madness of the current art world Asher B. Durand only recently became a boldface name. In May 2005 the New York Public Library allowed its star painting, Durand's 1849 "Kindred Spirits," to be spirited away for about $35 million by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton, who is building the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.

The sizable painting depicts two friends and well-known New York cultural figures, the landscapist Thomas Cole, who had recently died, and the poet-journalist William Cullen Bryant, communing on a rocky ledge in a scenic gorge. It's a moving if slightly schmaltzy tribute to the richness of the city's cultural patrimony. Donated to the library in 1904 by Bryant's daughter, the painting had been there for more than 100 years, and is arguably Durand's best-known and most striking work, evoking the majesty of nature while emphasizing its harmony with the human spirit. The painting's removal from its native habitat is a real loss.



Metropolitan Museum of Art
Durand's eye for detail is evident in "The Beeches" (1845).

Count it as good news, though, that it is now on view at the Brooklyn Museum, where it has returned to appear in "Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape," a show of about 60 Durand works organized by Linda S. Ferber, former chairwoman and curator of American painting at the Brooklyn Museum. (Now a vice president and museum director of the New-York Historical Society, Ms. Ferber is mounting a separate exhibition there devoted to Durand's world that opens next month.)

One of the less dramatic painters of the Hudson River School, Durand (1796-1886) favored the realistic approach to landscape advocated by the English critic John Ruskin, rather than the metaphorical view held by Cole and other Hudson Riverites that its representation ought to express God's sublimity. Obeying Ruskin's call for truth to nature, Durand explored forest interiors with close attention to the ways of trees, foliage, rocks and ground cover in smaller paintings, while his larger and more elaborate exhibition pictures, influenced by European masters like Claude Lorrain and John Constable, are Arcadian visions suffused with light, color and atmospheric perspective.

A vibrant example of both approaches is "The Beeches" (1845), a landscape in a vertical format that was new in his work and probably derived from Constable. A beech and a linden tree, leaning but sturdy and in vigorous leaf, dominate the left foreground. Beside them a rustic path meanders down to a shining pond, which a shepherd and his fleecy flock are nearing. In the distance a range of pale blue hills juts into a bluer but cloud-streaked sky. If it is compositionally similar to Constable's 1826 canvas "The Cornfield," never mind. The harmoniously lighted scene, projecting an atmosphere of peace, plenty and all's right with the world, was warmly received by critics, admired as much for its ambitious scale as for its "every-day character," as one viewer wrote at the time of its exhibition.

Durand's prowess as a painter was all the more interesting because he had no formal training in fine art. Apprenticed to an engraver in his youth, he became a master in that profession but was ambitious to assume the more prestigious role of easel artist. By 1826, he had become a power in the art world, one of the founders of the National Academy of Design, which he later served as president for 16 years.

His interest in painting was intensified by his discovery that year of several Cole canvases. He saw them in a Manhattan dealer's shop he visited with two prominent artist friends, John Trumbull and William Dunlap. Each of the three bought one.

Durand became close friends with Cole, who encouraged his painting ambitions. By 1835, urged on by a patron, the merchant Luman Reed, Durand was painting life portraits of presidents and other prominent figures, and by 1838 had begun to try his hand at landscape. One of these early ventures, whose humor is almost unique in his work, is "Dance on the Battery in the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant" (1838), a kind of fête galante on the order of Watteau, in which Stuyvesant, the peg-legged governor of New York, sits out a merry if rather stiffly painted country dance under sheltering trees.

An 1837 sketching trip with Cole to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks seemed to fix Durand's concentration on landscape. His work became stronger after a year in Europe in 1840 to study the old masters with a view to improving his composition and color handling. He became known for his elegant scenic depictions, mostly in the Catskill, Adirondack and White Mountain regions, like "Mountain Stream" (circa 1848), which shows a boulder-filled rivulet running between woodsy mountainsides toward the deep gorge known as the Kaaterskill Clove, with the Catskill range thrusting up in the background. A stag stands poised on a rock in the picture's center.

But he departed often enough from formula paintings over the years to hold his viewers' interest. One example is the large "Progress (The Advance of Civilization)" (1853). An uncharacteristically bold endorsement of the Manifest Destiny belief in United States expansion to the Pacific, it was commissioned by the New York collector Charles Gould. It gives a reverse twist to Cole's pessimistic painting "The Course of Empire" (1833-36) by depicting what Ms. Ferber calls "the landscape of investment."



New York Public Library,
Robert L. Stuart Collection

In "Progress" an imaginary topography suggesting the Catskills and the Hudson River is replete with villages, farms, steamboats and a railroad. A dazzling city sits near the horizon, struck by the light from a benignly expansive sky. In the not-so-pretty foreground, a hardscrabble road leads out of the picture, and a clutch of American Indians survey the alarming scene from a rock in a forest area packed into the lower left corner of the canvas.

I can't resist quoting here one view of Durand's work by the critic and teacher Frank Jewett Mather, who said in 1927, "It was a calamity for American line engraving when Durand quit such work as this for 40 years of mediocre landscape painting." But that was one man's opinion. If the show reveals some of Durand's weaknesses — repetitive themes and borrowings from other artists — it reinforces his strong sense of artistic mission and his potent role in shaping the esthetic of 19th-century America.

At the New-York Historical Society, which owns much Durand material given over the years by his family, Ms. Ferber is mounting an engrossing show (April 13 to Sept. 30), "The World of Asher B. Durand: The Artist in the Antebellum New York." Its more than 70 works include paintings by Durand and his fellow artists, among them Trumbull, Dunlap, Cole, William Sidney Mount and John F. Kensett. Portraits of Durand's circle of artists, writers, critics, publishers and patrons add much to the show's interest.

Sketchbooks and memorabilia, including Durand's gold pocket watch and his silver cigar box, are part of the exhibition, along with examples of his early engravings and even a brass lathe developed by his brother Cyrus for stamping the intricate "safety" backgrounds on bank notes created by the artist. Highlights include handsome likenesses of his two wives, Lucy Baldwin Durand and Mary Frank Durand, and a charming portrait of his three children in an idyllic setting, made after Lucy's death in 1830. As a pendant to — no, more than that, an enhancement of — the Brooklyn show, it's well worth taking in.

"Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape" continues through July 29 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, (718) 638-5000; brooklynmuseum.org.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Opera "El Primer Emperador" 23 Diciembre 2006


Music Review | Opera 'The First Emperor'
The Emperor's New Clothes
A Majestic Imperial Chinese Saga Has Its Premiere at the Met
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: December 23, 2006



Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
The First Emperor Tan Dun's new opera, with Plácido Domingo in the title role as a third century B.C. Chinese ruler, with sets by Fan Yue and costumes by Emi Wada, continues through Jan. 25 at the Metropolitan Opera House

The relative rarity of world premieres at the Metropolitan Opera does not alone explain the buildup of good will, genuine excitement and high expectation over "The First Emperor," the opera by the Chinese-American composer Tan Dun, which had its premiere on Thursday night, conducted by the composer.


Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Plácido Domingo as the man who created the Chinese empire and whose influence on China is still felt today.

Over the years Mr. Tan has drawn new audiences to classical music with eclectic works that find common ground between Asian traditions and the avant-garde. His ferociously propulsive film score for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" won him both an Oscar and a pop-culture following. Zhang Yimou, the Chinese director of this production, best known for his popular film "House of Flying Daggers," also adds luster to the project. And Plácido Domingo, by taking on the title role, the first role he has created in his 38 years at the Met, contributes his formidable star power.

The story of the opera, based on incidents from the life of Qin Shi Huang, the prince and warlord who unified China through the brutal conquest of other states and became the country's first emperor, is timely and psychologically complex. That all nine performances are essentially sold out is good news for the Met, for contemporary music and for opera over all. My guess is that a large number of the ticket-holders are opera neophytes attracted by the novelty of this project and hoping for a grand theatrical experience.

Still, music drives the theatrical experience of opera, and Mr. Tan's score is an enormous disappointment, all the more so because whole stretches of it, and many arresting musical strokes, confirm his gifts.

The opera, with a libretto in English by Mr. Tan and Ha Jin, begins hauntingly with sounds of the East. Muffled drums and the humming drone of the waterphone (a bowed instrument with a bowl full of water) seem to come from the beyond, as low tremolos and a slinky melody emerge from the strings. The Yin-Yang Master (Wu Hsing-Kuo), singing in the style of Beijing opera, with nasal tone and vocal slides, takes us back 2,000 years to introduce the story of the emperor, who has roused his army and the people of Qin (pronounced chin) to conquer their neighbors and ward off barbarians. A row of 12 costumed palace musicians playing enormous Chinese drums thwack out pummeling rhythms as the riled-up choristers, the people of Qin, ask in chilling outbursts who their next victims will be.

The musical problems start shortly after Mr. Domingo appears, in the regalia of the emperor, and calls for the people to desist in their savage cries. He now controls the most feared army in the land and is bent on wiping out cultural differences in the conquered regions of China. What his nation needs is a stirring musical anthem to foster unity, he explains, in the opera's first flight into lyricism.

But Mr. Tan's approach to operatic lyricism and vocal writing seems ill-conceived. In preparing this work, he drew on his studies of ancient Chinese folk music, filtering those styles through techniques learned by attending almost every opera the Met produced during his years in New York, starting with his days as a graduate student and a fledgling professional musician. He wanted "The First Emperor" to sing, like the Italian operas he and countless other buffs adore.

His music does sing. And sing. And sing. On and on. Whatever the mood of the moment, whether dreamy, defiant, sensual or tragic, as soon as the characters break into song, the melodic lines are inevitably long, arching and slow. Even when the orchestra bustles with intensity, the often cloying vocal lines hovering above still move with almost unvarying deliberateness. In the Italian operas Mr. Tan has in mind — say, Puccini's "Turandot" — the pacing of vocal lines accords with the impetuosity of the moment and the flow of the words. Mr. Tan's goal in this work, it would seem, was to create a ritualistic and hypnotic lyricism. But "The First Emperor" gives soaring melody a bad name.

Also, because Mr. Tan integrates Chinese melodic elements into the music, the vocal lines continually move by wide and sometimes awkward leaps to unusual notes, making the phrases tiring for the singers. There is undeniable artistry at work in all this. Playing through these passages on the piano (from the piano-vocal score), I found some of Mr. Tan's exotic harmonies and elusive vocal lines enticing. But a little of this goes a long way.

Between the scenes of ruminative lyricism come orchestral passages that are much more inventive and effective. Take, for example, the crucial third scene of Act I. Emperor Qin has implored Gao Jianli, his estranged childhood friend and a gifted musician, to compose the unifying anthem. But Gao Jianli, whose mother was killed when his homeland was conquered by the emperor, is full of bitterness and resists. Princess Yueyang, the emperor's willful and alluring daughter, has fallen for Gao Jianli, even though she is pledged to the emperor's right arm, General Wang. In this scene, the princess slowly seduces Gao Jianli, who cannot resist her.

And slowly is the operative word. The expansive lyricism begins enticingly but soon turns saccharine and, worse, inert. Yet when the singers depart, the orchestra, vividly enriched with Chinese instruments, takes up their themes and processes them through thick, spiky, grippingly astringent harmonies. Would that there were more such moments in the opera. The choral ensembles are also powerful and harmonically bracing, including the crucial final anthem, in which Gao Jianli, defying the emperor, recycles a mournful slave song. The more "The First Emperor" sounds like "Crouching Tiger" the better; the more it sounds like updated "Turandot," the more tedious it becomes.

The Met has spared no expense in mounting this $2 million co-production with the Los Angeles Opera. The set by Fan Yue is dominated by stairs through which you can sometimes glimpse colored banners and assembled masses. Descending from ropes above the stage is an intricate network of stones, representing both the writing tablets on which the emperor codified the Chinese language and the blocks of the Great Wall, with which his name is associated. Emi Wada has created 400 wildly colored costumes.

You have to admire the cast members for their willingness to grapple with this unconventional new work, though the demands of the wide-ranging vocal lines were evident in some tired-sounding singing. As Gao Jianli, the tenor Paul Groves summoned ardor and energy. The agile coloratura soprano Elizabeth Futral made a kittenish and sensual Princess Yueyang. The charismatic mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung was mostly wasted as the long-fingered, ominous Shaman, a rather campy role. The mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer brought dignity to the smaller role of the princess's mother, and the sturdy bass Hao Jiang Tian was a stern General Wang.

And give credit to Mr. Domingo, who at nearly 66 is still ambitious, still taking chances and challenging himself. He mostly sang with stamina and burnished power. True, his best friend onstage often seemed to be the experienced prompter, Donna Racik, invisible to the audience but quite often the focus of Mr. Domingo's attention. And though the role was written for him, he could not disguise the effort involved in singing it. Despite his trouble with top notes in recent years, Mr. Domingo's voice sounded freshest when the lines took him into his still clarion upper range. The man takes on too much. But what a major artist!

With one intermission, the opera lasted just 3 hours 20 minutes yet seemed much longer. In the final scene, the emperor's inauguration — after his daughter has taken her own life (in what may be the longest farewell aria in opera, which is saying something), and after his general has been poisoned by Gao Jianli, who then mutilates himself by biting off his own tongue to spite the emperor — Mr. Domingo breaks one final time into lofty flights of ponderously arching lyricism. Listening, you cannot help thinking, "Oh, no, not again."

THE FIRST EMPEROR

Music by Tan Dun; libretto by Mr. Tan and Ha Jin; conductor, Mr. Tan; production by Zhang Yimou; co-director, Wang Chaoge; sets by Fan Yue; costumes by Emi Wada; choreography by Dou Dou Huang; lighting by Duane Schuler. At the Metropolitan Opera. Additional performances are on Tuesday, Friday, Jan. 2, 5, 9, 22 and 25 at 8 p.m., and Jan. 13 at 1:30 p.m.; (212) 362-6000.

WITH: Plácido Domingo (Emperor Qin), Elizabeth Futral (Princess Yueyang), Michelle DeYoung (Shaman), Paul Groves (Gao Jianli), Hao Jiang Tian (General Wang), Susanne Mentzer (Mother of Yueyang), Haijing Fu (Chief Minister), Wu Hsing-Kuo (Yin-Yang Master), Danrell Williams (Guard), Dou Dou Huang (principal male dancer), Qi Yao (Zheng Player).

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Ocho décadas de matrimonios gay.


THEATER REVIEW | 'SOME MEN'
'Some Men'
8 Decades of Gay Men, at the Altar With History

By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: March 27, 2007



Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
From left, Pedro Pascal, Romain Frugé, Frederick Weller and David Greenspan in "Some Men."

"You wanna get married?" says the school librarian, breathing heavily, to the handsome Korean War veteran at what is clearly the beginning of a beautiful relationship. This is not quite a Barbara Cartland moment, given its context in "Some Men," the surface-skimming, hit-and-miss new comedy by Terrence McNally that opened last night at the Second Stage Theater.

Mood, Lighting The setting is a gay bathhouse in the mid-1970s, a place and time when men were known to ask men to do all sorts of things, but marrying was usually not one of them. Yet the question — "You wanna get married?" — is more than frivolous, and it echoes throughout "Some Men."

Frivolous was definitely the mood when Mr. McNally visited the baths before. "The Ritz," his first Broadway success, was a farce that threw a heterosexual man (on the run from mobsters) into a homosexual bathhouse and watched him squirm. Mainstream audiences tended to leave "The Ritz" with the impression that gay men were wittier, better built, more sexually active and better versed in musicals and movies than most folks.

That impression is not dispelled by "Some Men," a breezy series of sketches about gay American life through eight decades, directed by Trip Cullman. In setting a scene in a bathhouse in 1975 (the year "The Ritz" opened), Mr. McNally clearly means to signal the differences not only between then and now but also between the perspectives of the young farceur he was and the mature, probing playwright he has become.

To be honest, though, "Some Men" has little of the psychological texture and shading found in Mr. McNally's best plays, like "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune" and "Lips Together, Teeth Apart." Nor does it exercise the tear-stirring emotional grip of Mr. McNally's last previous group portrait of gay men, "Love! Valour! Compassion!"

An uneven assembly of symmetrical blackout sketches, "Some Men" is a parade of cleanly drawn types, zippy one-liners and sentimental set pieces, woven into a pageant of the ages à la "Cavalcade," Noël Coward's generations-spanning tribute to the stiff upper lips of the British. Like "Cavalcade," it's a celebration of clichés that a culture takes comfort in believing.

The hot-button topic of gay marriage is the running theme of "Some Men," with the attendant questions that the subject invariably raises. "Some people think this marriage thing is going to be the end of gay life as it has been practiced on this planet for a hundred million years," says a character in the opening scene, set during a wedding between two men at the Waldorf-Astoria.

But in skipping back through the decades, "Some Men" suggests that the instincts that make gay men both want and not want to be married have always been in place. A well-groomed banker, frolicking on a Southampton beach with his rough-hewn chauffeur in the 1920s, speaks wistfully of trying to find a way "to spend as much of my life with you as I can."

Mr. McNally lightly traces patterns of loneliness and commitment, and the ambivalence his characters feel about both, through various times and places: a Harlem nightclub in 1932, where an entertainer known as Angel Eyes (Michael McElroy) meditates ruefully on the man who got away; a preppy piano bar in Greenwich Village on the day of the Stonewall uprising in 1969; a waiting room in an AIDS ward in 1989.

This is much-mined material, and it's been dealt with more insightfully and originally elsewhere. But Mr. Cullman keeps things moving at the jaunty pace of a nightclub revue. And the agile, appealing cast members, notably Frederick Weller and Don Amendolia, seem to have a good time incarnating time-honored figures from the encyclopedia of gay archetypes (the hustler with a literary bent, the acid-tongued insult queen), as well as some latter-day additions (doting adoptive parents, dogma-spouting gender-studies students).

Occasionally, a sharply observed moment pierces through the glibness. A scene depicting an Internet chat room offers, in addition to the expected satire about make-believe identities, some droll observations on the difficulties of translating the classic gay sensibility into cyberspeak.

"Humor doesn't travel on the Internet," says one man (screen name: Camus), frustrated by his inability to convey vocal inflections to his chatmate. "At least, my kind doesn't."

Camus is portrayed by the playwright David Greenspan, who as an actor has repeatedly demonstrated just how much inflection counts. Though his roles in "Some Men" are among the hoariest — variations on the waspish stingmeister he played in a revival of Mart Crowley's "Boys in the Band" — Mr. Greenspan uses his deadpan nasality to twist commonplace lines into uncommonly revealing stylishness.

He is saddled with a part that would send most actors running for cover: a transvestite who sings "Over the Rainbow" in a piano bar on the day of Judy Garland's funeral. Yet as rendered by Mr. Greenspan, his body listing to one side and his voice pitched in a childlike murmur of reassurance, that most oversung of songs sounds fresh and heartbreaking.

"Over the Rainbow" isn't just a time-encrusted anthem here; it's a means of exploring a personality that, while very much of its time and place, is also uncompromisingly individual. And for one illuminating moment, one of the play's title characters becomes specific instead of generic, something more than a grown-up boy in the band who may have a new set of instruments but still plays a familiar tune.

SOME MEN

By Terrence McNally; directed by Trip Cullman; sets by Mark Wendland; costumes by Linda Cho; lighting by Kevin Adams; sound by John Gromada; production stage manager, Lori Ann Zepp; stage manager, Stephanie Gatton; associate artistic director, Christopher Burney; production manager, Jeff Wild. Presented by the Second Stage Theater, Carole Rothman, artistic director; Ellen Richard, executive director. At the Second Stage Theater, 307 West 43rd Street, Clinton; (212) 246-4422. Through April 15. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.

WITH: Don Amendolia, Kelly AuCoin, Romain Frugé, David Greenspan, Jesse Hooker, Michael McElroy, Pedro Pascal, Randy Redd and Frederick Weller.

Monday, March 26, 2007

YouTube 2007 Awards

Arts.
Masterworks of Lo-Fi Video

YouTube Awards the Top of Its Heap
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: March 27, 2007



YouTube
Winners of the 2006 YouTube Video Awards include,
  • top row, from left, OK Go's "Here It Goes Again," for most creative,and "Smosh Short 2: Stranded," for best comedy;
  • second row, "Hotness Prevails," for best commentary, and "Ask a Ninja," for best series;
  • third row,"Say It's Possible," for best music video,and "Free Hugs Campaign," for most inspirational.
  • bottom row "Kiwi!," won for most adorable.

Et tu, YouTube? The mellow Silicon Valley "video-sharing site," once styled as nothing more than a converted loft space for oddball videos, is looking more Hollywood by the minute. Back in the day, say, six months ago, YouTube was still meant to be pure NoCal: no judgments, no hierarchies, big bandwidth and lots of freedom. YouTube videographers weren't supposed to get stars on their doors from the powers that be.

But now we have the 2006 YouTube Video Awards, a product — so the intro on the awards page says — of "the YouTube community." But given that the rushed and almost certainly screwy voting commenced only once the nominees were published by YouTube, this community project doesn't seem quite organic. The dread idea of arts administration has come to YouTube. And in a real insult to the speedy Web world, this 2006 event has happened well into spring 2007, honoring bygone achievements. That seems very Internal Revenue Service, not to mention very Oscars.

So, oh, looky here in the winners' circle. We've got the neato guys who dance on treadmills, Smosh, the Wine Kone and Ask a Ninja. If these names sounds fresh to you, well, then, YouTube's done its job, and maybe you'll stop by, hang out and find something that actually answers to your tastes.

To older hands, the award winners, announced yesterday, will be recognizable as YouTube veterans, and their selection here makes blindingly clear the site's slacker aesthetic (Smosh, OK Go and the Wine Kone); its mush politics (the Free Hugs Campaign); and its chronic oscillation between absurdism ("Ask a Ninja") and emo ("Say It's Possible").

This value system is not intrinsically worse than the one that determines prime-time television's crisp, white-collar aesthetic; its mainstream politics; and its chronic oscillation between punchy and sappy. It's just that YouTube's not really supposed to have any aesthetic or ideological principles, is it? YouTube's video superlatives might make you think that Google might one day hand out prizes for best or shadiest Web site. Or that Wikipedia might honor the most brilliant idea. YouTube, Google and Wikipedia should be low-key clearinghouses of shared information. Not prosceniums.

YouTube's winners also reveal the site's mystified attitude toward animation, in the form of the sweet but dull "Kiwi!" cartoon, which takes the most adorable video prize. Recently, humble animation has now become so refined and poignant in various high-end graduate programs that even cartoons about little birds now carry the slightly pretentious air of French film. (Animators often discuss credentials and technique in the prefaces to their videos on YouTube; video makers, on the contrary, want everything to look tossed off.)

The widespread animus toward "lonelygirl15," the hit online series that got its start on YouTube but then seemed to grow too big for its britches, also seems to be alive and well at the YouTube Awards, where it was nominated for several awards but won nothing.

Hostility toward the project comes through instead in choices like "Ask a Ninja" and "The Wine Kone," videos by two ubiquitous male soloists who have lampooned the series. The YouTube boys' club is packed. The Wine Kone, a handsome guy with a steady gaze and a wheezy chortle, holds forth there on belly-button issues, while the Ninja plays older brother, offering advice and pushing Net neutrality, the so-called First Amendment of the Web.

Terra Naomi with her heartbreaking "Say It's Possible" won best music video here. That's a wonderful choice. The song has got a sustained ache to it, and the visual setup for the video — the singer at the guitar crowding the camera, before an unused keyboard — is painterly, in the tradition of the best YouTube bedroom guitar videos. (Unlike the funny OK Go guys on their treadmills; I like their pluck, but it's too MTV for YouTube.) With the look of a young Keith Richards, Terra Naomi is the only girl cool enough to make the cut in the YouTube awards.

The pity of these awards is ultimately that they might be some people's first contact with YouTube. That would be sad. My words of advice for people new to YouTube: Forget awards, and forget hip.

Instead, follow your pre-Internet interests to vintage film on YouTube, and that will lead you to video commentary, parodies and community. For starters, why not track down Ernest Hemingway with a man-size marlin, Shirley Verrett as Lady Macbeth, interviews with Sigmund Freud or color film from the Korean War?

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Cornell 1967. Little Brother Gordon Matta-Clark


Art Review
Cross Sections of Yesterday
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: February 23, 2007



Collection of Jane Crawford and Bob Fiore
"Splitting 10 & 11" (1975)
To create "Splitting" (1975) Matta-Clark cut down the middle of a frame house, bisecting it, then severing the four corners of the roof.

In the 1974 silent color film that documents his brief antics atop the Clocktower Building in Lower Manhattan, Gordon Matta-Clark, wearing a black raincoat, black tights and white gloves, like a modern-day Charlie Chaplin, shaves, brushes his teeth and showers with a garden hose while balancing on the edge of the clock face. Then he reclines in a harness, covered in shaving cream, before casually spinning the arms of the giant clock. The camera pans at the end to show the panorama from Broadway, where Matta-Clark is a speck high on the skyline, nearly invisible.



Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society, New York
A delicate touch with a chain saw: For "Office Baroque" (1977) Gordon Matta-Clark cut through the floors of an office building in Antwerp.

He looks so blissful up there in the soot and sunshine, having what was clearly a great time, reminding us of that less regulated New York City wherein a cheeky young man, if so inclined, might dangle from the outside of a tall building for a while and not attract undue attention. If there's a metaphor for what the downtown art world was, but no longer is, that's it.

The much anticipated, excellent Matta-Clark retrospective that just opened at the Whitney recalls this charismatic Pied Piper of experimentalism from the frontier days of what came to be called SoHo, which he helped establish as a lively art community. Thanks partly to him, we got the groundbreaking exhibition space at 112 Greene Street that evolved into White Columns, where he grew mushrooms in the basement and melted bottles into gorgeous colored bricks. He also cooked up the idea for the fabled Food, an artist-run, community-spirited restaurant-as-be-in on the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets, catering to hungry neighborhood artists and pioneering hippie-ish taste for global cuisine, fresh produce and sushi in the days when exotic seasoning in New York still meant salsa and soy sauce.

There's a photograph of Matta-Clark, long-haired and shockingly boyish, in too-short jeans, with his partner Carol Goodden (who, not surprisingly, nearly lost her inheritance bankrolling Food), outside the failed Puerto Rican bodega that Food was to occupy. Elisabeth Sussman, the Whitney's curator, writes in the show's catalog that the place represented "the best picture of an artists' utopia, in all its extraordinary ordinariness, that Matta-Clark imagined."



Guggenheim Museum
"Conical Intersect" (1975)

It didn't last long, naturally. Alas, neither did Matta-Clark. When he died, from cancer, in 1978, at 35, he seemed to have taken with him much of that messianic, carefree ethos that arose when New York was a crumbling capital with mean streets, cheap rents and bad air, and when art wasn't worth much either, so nothing was impossible.

He arrives back in town not a minute too soon, a prophetic inspiration to artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Olafur Eliasson and other collaborative, socially inclined, architecturally venturesome figures attuned to the scrappy 1970s spirit. He's also an implicit rebuke. Matta-Clark represents a whole different notion of the art world from the youth-besotted, money-sick one we've got today. How sweet that this retrospective opens at the same time the art fairs do.

I have no doubt that Matta-Clark is now being turned into a hot commercial commodity as quickly as you can say David Zwirner Gallery, but at least at the Whitney you can see what he aspired to be. Aside from Food, he came up with various wonderfully harebrained ideas. Literally, in one case: after letting his hair grow for a year, he cut it off as a kind of performance and phrenological gag. The preserved hair, dutifully tagged piece by piece, opens the show, like a holy relic.

He also sautéed a Polaroid of a Christmas tree in grease. The copy he sent to Robert Smithson, golden brown on the outside, is here too, and none too appetizing, I might add. With his friend Juan Downey he proffered oxygen from a kind of makeshift hot dog stand with back-to-back wheelchairs. At Documenta, in Kassel, Germany, in 1977, he climbed up a smokestack. (Matthew Barney, who famously assaulted an elevator shaft there later, was just following in his footsteps.)

And most notably, often under cover of darkness, he pursued his version of tool-belt conceptualism. He chopped up abandoned buildings, making huge, baroque cuts in them with chain saws, slicing and dicing like a chef peeling an orange or devising radish flowers. (The food analogy wasn't lost on him.) As at the Clocktower, he loved playing the daredevil, and, for all the heavy equipment and immense scale, he had a surprisingly delicate touch.

At the center of the show is "Splitting." To a plain single-family suburban frame house in Englewood, N.J., he made a cut straight down the middle, bisecting the building, then severing the four corners of the roof like so many trophy heads. It was spectacular but not quite like the times he sawed tear-shaped holes into floors of an office building in Antwerp, or conical openings into a pair of antique houses in Paris slated for demolition next to where the Pompidou Center was being built. What resulted were vertiginous, Piranesean spaces, uncannily beautiful and kinetic, preserved on film and in drawings and in collaged photographs that, as you can see in the show, are like Rubik's cubes or Eschers.

Closer to home, before the New York City police locked the place up, he transformed a ghostly turn-of-the-century industrial shed on Pier 52, near Gansevoort Street in Greenwich Village (where he grew up), into a temporary cathedral of light. He even made a moat inside, by removing a 10-foot-wide section of the wood floor. And with a blowtorch he cut an enormous elliptical window out of the tin wall at the far west end.

In the film, which is slow but worth the effort, you see him suspended, his face brightly reflected in the sparkly glare of the torch, cutting the ellipse, then slowly removing it with a winch. Late afternoon sun pours around the edges, making a kind of drawing out of blinding light. The effect resembles a lunar eclipse, and it's just plain magnificent.



Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society, New York
Item used in "Office Baroque," foreground, with finished product

Installed in an airy, open plan on the Whitney's lofty top floor (Matta-Clark might have liked the space), the retrospective consists of the films, as well as drawings, photographs and some of the architectural pieces he cut out of buildings. I wish the catalog were a better read, and easier to use, but it is densely illustrated. By necessity, the show is heavy on documents, reflecting that just-the-facts style popular among '70s Conceptualists. This lends the display an initially gray and forbidding veneer. But give it time. It's got a light, mischievous heart.

The best rooms are devoted to "Conical Intersect" in Paris, "Office Baroque" in Antwerp and "Splitting" in New Jersey. The drawings are casual and not too interesting, but the luxurious black-and-white photographs from Paris speak more to Matta-Clark's formal elegance. His collaged photos of "Splitting" mix elegy with ecstasy, which neatly sums up his sense of architecture. Glossy Cibachromes, hybrid documents and collages express his late fascination with a new technology. Cibachrome let him make big, dizzying, gaudy color images, which were the closest he ever came to catering to a market.

The big sculptures are the only serious letdown. You see irregular chunks of floor-cum-ceiling, from a building in the Bronx, which make colorful, multi-textured, pentimentoed readymades. They're archaeological collages. Part of the outside of the Englewood house has a visual geometry that derives from the syncopation of clapboard and window frames.

But scraps of architecture, even big ones, ultimately look inert, while Matta-Clark's actions entailed forms of pyrotechnical, swashbuckling athleticism that come across best in the films and the photographs, and which speak to his glamorous roots.



Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society, New York
"Bronx Floors: Threshold (Boston Post Road, Bronx)" (1973)

He came from art royalty. Matta-Clark's father was the Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta. A notorious womanizer and all-around piece of work, Matta skipped town and moved to Paris when his twin sons were babies. Gordon eventually added his mother's maiden name to his own. From Matta, he got something of his cosmopolitanism, his taste for the surreal and an interest in architecture, which he studied at Cornell, not to mention good connections. ("Did you ever call on Marcel Breuer, the architect?" Matta wrote to Matta-Clark in 1962, just before Breuer designed the Whitney. "He is a very good friend of mine.")

One wonders whether Matta-Clark's faith in community, his crusade for urban affairs, his general bravado, came in reaction to his negligent father. He straddled worlds, as did his parents. The cuts in buildings spoke to issues of decay and civic renewal, which were at the forefront of public debate in New York, at the same time that the shapes he concocted out of his arabesque cuts conjured up three-dimensional versions of abstractions by European artists like Fontana, Boccioni or Kandinsky, whose stylish Modernism was Matta's heritage. His photographic collages make me think of Rauschenberg, while the syncopated lines that Matta-Clark sliced through some of the buildings bring Mondrian to mind, especially the project in Genoa; likewise the cut drawings, which he made by slicing a chain saw through stacks of paper.



Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society, New York
"Circus" (1978)

In other words, as with the food at Food, he occupied a kind of limbo, culturally speaking. Maybe that's why his work kept pointing toward those in-between spaces we occupy but pass by, the invisible ones we all share.



Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society, New York
Matta-Clark working on the house in Englewood, New Jersey, used for "Splitting," in 1974.

He often talked about edges: about the areas between walls, between a floor and a ceiling — about gaps and voids, which he made into art. In the show are photographs that he took of the spaces under chairs, between the floors of buildings, on the ceiling of a loft, where the sprinkler pipes were: places people don't usually bother to notice. "Opening up view to the unvisible" (he loved wordplay), was something he jotted on a note to himself. It might be his manifesto.

Which partly accounts for the scheme he came up with during the early '70s to buy parcels of "gutterspace" — tiny, useless pieces of land, the remnants of surveying errors and zoning anomalies that New York City auctioned off to raise petty cash. Matta-Clark had a video shot of him (by Jaime Davidovich) as a kind of hipster Harold Lloyd knocking on doors in Queens, trying to locate his properties, chalking off six-inch strips of driveway and peering through chain-link fences at patches of weeds that he determined were his.



Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society, New York
Gordon Matta-Clark and friends performing for "Tree Dance" at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1971.

He also took photographs of the parcels, which, when strung together, make glorious Cubist collages. Look at all these unloved places abandoned by bureaucratic neglect, as are the people who sometimes live near there. Property, Matta-Clark seemed to be saying, can have its own metabolism (again, the food analogy). Its use changes, along with its value, depending on what we choose to make of it.

The big message was: Life as art and art as life, a philosophy dependent on our being properly attuned and keen to the moment. During a career barely a decade long, everything Matta-Clark did somehow reinforced this idea.

You may wander through this show in any direction, a democratic touch by Ms. Sussman in keeping with Matta-Clark's approach. This lets you encounter "Tree Dance," at either the beginning or the end. In 1971 Matta-Clark enlisted dancers to hang from branches of a big tree at Vassar College. They squirmed and lay around in netted wombs, like hammocks. He filmed them.



Collection of Jane Crawford and Bob Fiore
To create "Splitting" (1975) Matta-Clark cut down the middle of a frame house, bisecting it, then severing the four corners of the roof.

Less instantly catchy than the buildings, "Tree Dance" is a slow-burn affair. I passed it by at first, then turned back.

Everything's in it. The play of light. The vertiginous space. The ways the branches draw complex lines in the air. The communal endeavor. And, looking skyward, it suggests all those organic allusions to passing time, which, as with Matta-Clark on the Clocktower, give a slightly melancholy twist to his unprepossessing comedy.

Maybe that's just nostalgia talking. Or maybe it's the hope the work conveys that the world is infinitely compelling if we keep our eyes open. Either way, it's heavenly.

The Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective continues through June 3 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street; (212) 570-3676.

Leni Riefenstahl. La Diva del Reich.


Sunday Book Review
Reich Star
By CLIVE JAMES
Published: March 25, 2007

Steven Bach/Jerry Bauer
LENI The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. By Steven Bach. Illustrated. 386 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

Jürgen Trimborn/R. Bales
LENI RIEFENSTAHL A Life. By Jürgen Trimborn. Translated by Edna McCown. Illustrated. 351 pp. Faber & Faber. $30.
Related First Chapter: 'Leni Riefenstahl' (March 25, 2007)

A BRAZEN shout from long trumpets held high at the angle of a Hitler salute. Cut to medium close-up of young Aryan faces with puffed cheeks. Dolly back as two new biographies of Leni Riefenstahl appear virtually at once. Jürgen Trimborn's book, well translated from the German by Edna McCown, has the better pictures. Steven Bach's book, backed up by his deep personal experience as a high-echelon film executive handling dingbat directors, has the better text. Though neither book is precisely adulatory, put them together and they add up to an awful lot of attention. She might be dead, but she won't lie down.



Carin Goldberg

The same was true for much of the time she was still alive. Born in 1902, she lived for more than a hundred years. In less than half that time, she acquired a brilliant reputation. But she had to spend the rest of her life mounting a posthumous defense of it.

Already nationally famous in the pre-Nazi period as an actress and director, in the Nazi period she grew world famous by giving the new, globally ambitious political movement a screen image of overwhelming authority, glamorous even to those who sensed its evil.

Some spectators thought even at the time that her cinematic gift had served to legitimize a murderous ideology, but almost nobody belittled her artistic talent. She was thus able, when the Nazis lost, to invoke the principle that art trumps politics. Photographed too often with her raised hand pointed in Hitler's direction, quoted too often on the subject of his transformative vision, she was unable to deny that she had held her mentor in high regard, but she never stopped denying until her long-postponed last gasp that she had ever known much about what the Nazis were really up to. She had been too busy being a great artist.



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Leni Riefenstahl filming "Tiefland" in 1940.

To make this line stick, she had the help of her two big movies from the 1930s, "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia."

Though the first now stands revealed as a gruesomely choreographed hymn to naked power and the second spends too much of its time weighing sport down with a neoclassic gravitas that feels like being hit over the head with the Parthenon, there were, even after the end of the Thousand Year Reich's 12-year run, plenty of knowledgeable critics in the victorious democracies who called her portentous epics masterpieces. For her cinéaste admirers, the aesthetics left the ethics nowhere. It seemed a fair guess that anyone so wrapped up in creating an imaginary world would be bound to miss the odd detail about what was going on in the real one. The Holocaust? Forget about it.



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Riefenstahl in Nuremberg in 1934, for the filming of "Triumph of the Will."

To assist in the forgetting, Leni also had the help of her histrionic abilities, which might never have been subtle but were always in a good state of training, because there had rarely been a moment of her conscious life when she had not shown her emotions as the only way of having them. (In her early phase as a film star, she hammed it up even in the stills.) She would act indignant when she was asked an awkward question. If you asked it again, she would storm out, fall down, shriek, weep.

Above all, however, she had the help of time. After the trap-door stopped rattling and banging at Nuremberg, it got harder and harder to find a Nazi with a famous name. The ones in Argentina had unlisted telephone numbers. But Leni Riefenstahl's new shyness was all a pose. She had a way of hiding only where she could be found, and she never ceased to assure the world that although she and Hitler had spent a lot of time talking in private, she never knew anything about what was happening to the Jews.

More than half a century went by and she was still there, popping up at film festivals to keep her cinematic legend in trim, conspicuously disappearing into Africa to build a new career as a photographer, steadily acquiring the validation that comes automatically with endurance. "What am I guilty of?" The martyred look that went with that refrain made it seem as if the suffering had all happened to her. (The dogged Trimborn, a professor at the University of Cologne, is especially good at tracking her through a final phase that lasted longer than the Pleistocene.) She showed no remorse, saying that she had no reason to. Those who were all too well aware that she did have reason to died off faster than she did, so finally there were whole new generations to take her genius for granted.

We might as well do the same, because over the question of her talent it isn't worth fighting a battle. Among the people who run the movie business anywhere in the world, women are a minority even today, and still under pressure to exercise feminine wiles. When the lowly born Leni was starting out, the minority, even in go-ahead Weimar Germany, was the merest handful. Luckily for her, she had feminine wiles to burn: until she was old and gray, she met few men who didn't fall for her on the spot. It could be said that she had looks and energy but no real brain. The evidence was overwhelming that she didn't need one.



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Leni Riefenstahl, center, on a dolly filming her documentary "Olympia," on the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

As a young actress, she was so beautiful that other women could find nothing bad to say about her except that her eyes were too close together. But her acting on screen was strictly frown, laugh, bubble and jump. She made it as a star because she was good at climbing rocks. There was a whole genre of German movies about clambering around daringly at high altitude. In a string of mountain pictures including "The White Hell of Pitz Palu," Leni proved that she could do that stuff without a double. There was no peak, however vertiginous, that she could not sprint to the top of wearing very few clothes. On the other hand, there was no director, however illustrious, whom she could not hurl herself beneath wearing no clothes at all. Or at least she gave him the illusion that she might: a power of suggestion that we can usefully regard as her most persuasive thespian gift.

Fixed on becoming a director herself, she applied the same gift when bending producers and studio bigwigs to her triumphant will. Her real originality was in setting her sights high, up there where the men were making the decisions. All the right potentates duly succumbed to her allure. "I must meet that man" was an exhortation often on her lips. Before the Nazis came to power, some of the men she felt compelled to meet were Jews. Afterward, none of them were. It could be said that she never came out as an anti-Semite, but it could also be said that there is a green cheese moon.

Made on the eve of the Weimar Republic's final agony, her film "The Blue Light" — she was producer, director, writer, editor and star — drew less than universal acclaim. She blamed the Jewish critics. After the Nazis came to power, her co-writer and co-director on the movie, Bela Balazs, was too insistent about getting paid. Balazs was a Jew. She had his name removed from the credits to render the film judenfrei, and eventually found a sure-fire way to keep him out of the picture permanently. She turned his name over to Julius Streicher.

To defuse the significance of an act like that, it wouldn't be enough to call her ignorant. You would have to call her an idiot. Everybody knew what Streicher stood for. Gauleiter of Franconia, editor of the lethally scurrilous Nazi weekly Der Stürmer, he was the most famous Jew-baiter in Germany.

But she had a bigger buddy than Streicher. Hitler had liked "The Blue Light," so when she once again said "I must meet that man" her wish was easily answered. Coy for the rest of her endless life on the subject of whether she threw him one, she always wanted it to be thought that only his total dedication to the cause held him back. Given her track record with men, the mere fact that she spent time alone with him was enough to confer on her all the power of the Führer's public darling. (Hardly anybody knew about Eva Braun. Everybody knew about Leni.) She was given full access to film the 1934 party rally at Nuremberg. After six months of editing — possessing almost no sense of story, she invariably had to dig her movies out of a mountain of footage — the finished product appeared in 1935 as "Triumph of the Will."



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Riefenstahl in Africa, 1971.

Hitler loved the movie. Critics who still feel the same way are apt to underrate the part played by Albert Speer, who came up with the lighting and décor all on his own. The camera had to look up at Hitler because Speer put him there. But Leni undoubtedly did a thorough job of making what was already frighteningly impressive look more frighteningly impressive still. If 10,000 men marching in lock-step turn you on, Leni could make them look like 20,000.

The top Nazis were delighted. They included Joseph Goebbels, whom Leni, after the war, found it expedient to characterize as a dangerous enemy jealous of his bailiwick as the supreme studio executive nominally in charge of Nazi movies. In fact Goebbels, generously overlooking her rejection of his advances — and for the idea that he ever made a pounce, we have only her notoriously unreliable word — thought highly of her artistic prowess, blowing his top only when she showed signs, in his view, of spending the Reich's money as if it were her own. (Bach, who wrote "Final Cut," the best-ever book about a film director — Michael Cimino of "Heaven's Gate" — on the rampage, is especially good on the subject of how Leni treated a budget as the merest letter of intent.)

After "Triumph of the Will," the road was open for Leni to do what she wanted. What she wanted was to turn the 1936 Berlin Olympics into a celluloid masterpiece. By far her most palatable cinematic achievement, "Olympia" was, and remains, crucial to her later reputation. Even more crucial is that the film is not notably a Nazi one. Hitler the arch-nationalist didn't enjoy being stuck with staging an international event, but while he was at it he had enough sense to go light on the ideology. Few restrictions were placed on what Leni could film. Not many Jewish athletes were there to be filmed anyway, but there were black athletes present, and one of them was Jesse Owens, whom Leni didn't hesitate to caress with her lenses as if he were a godlike figure.

She wasn't having a thing with Owens. She was having that with another American, the decathlete Glenn Morris, whom she obliged to add an 11th discipline to his event. But she filmed Owens with loving appreciation. It's a shameful consideration that no Hollywood director would have been encouraged to do the same, at the time. Owens in repose looked lovely anyway, and on the move he was poetic, but it took a fine eye and a lot of knowledge to get the poetry on film, and Leni knew how to do that with him and with many another athlete. It was only logical for the camera to climb the tower with the diver, for example, but she figured out how to do it.

Susan Sontag later made a serious mistake in arguing that "Olympia" was entirely steeped in fascist worship of the beautiful body. But it's nature that worships the beautiful body. Fascism is natural. That's what's wrong with it: it's nothing else. Despite the too often prevailing calisthenic mass maneuvers, as if Busby Berkeley had met Praxiteles, much of the reputation "Olympia" has for beauty can thus safely be endorsed, but always with the proviso that a lot of the athletic events were beautiful anyway, and that her technical inventions for capturing them would eventually suffer the fate of all technical inventions and be superseded: everything she did in Berlin in 1936 was topped by what Kon Ichikawa did in Tokyo in 1964. Nevertheless, Leni, with her raw material handed to her on a plate, and unhampered by those requirements of invented narrative that she could never manage, had made quite a movie for its time.

In November 1938, Leni, who had probably always had one eye on Hollywood, flew the Nazi flag to America. She had every reason to expect that she was heading for a big welcome, and she initially had the beginnings of one, but five days after her ship docked in New York, Kristallnacht happened in Germany. If ever there was a time to play the artist, that was it. But she blew the scene with what she said. She said that nothing had happened, and that to suggest such a thing was a slander.

Walt Disney gave her a tour of his studios, but the rest of Hollywood gave her the freeze. Almost nobody else in America except Henry Ford even invited her for drinks. Back in Germany, she reported to Goebbels, who was suitably indignant on behalf of his thwarted artist. "The Jews," he wrote in his diary, "rule by terror and bribery." When the Nazi counterterror against the Jews went rolling into the East, Leni, in sole command of her own film unit, was along for the ride, but she saw something in Poland that stopped her in her tracks, even if it didn't stop the Nazis. She was accidentally present at a mass shooting in the town square of Konskie. According to her later testimony — or rather, according to the lack of it — she was the only eyewitness to the occasion who managed not to notice that all the victims were Jews. Nevertheless, she was photographed looking distraught.

As a general rule, any expression on Leni's face when a camera was pointing in her direction was adopted at her own command, but in this case it might have been possible that her distress was genuine. Whatever the truth of this permanently controversial moment, however, it seems probable that Leni, when she next saw Hitler, asked permission to be excused from the war. She didn't opt out of the Nazi Party's inexorable conquest of the world — she was there to film Hitler's victory parade in Warsaw, the only time he lent his presence to such an event — but she never again went near a battle. Instead, she resumed filming "Tiefland," the dramatic blockbuster that she had abandoned after the Nazis came to power. Here was the chance for her to prove, to the full satisfaction of her postwar admirers, that she was indeed an artist who had no knowledge of what the Nazis were really doing.

Once again she blew it. Financed on a no-budget basis at Hitler's personal orders, "Tiefland" had unlimited resources, including an infinitely flexible schedule. Bach, no doubt still haunted by memories of Michael Cimino's plausible extravagance, is well set to evoke the consequences, one of which wasn't funny at all. Her pet project needed some Spanish-looking extras, so Leni shipped in some Gypsies from a holding camp where they were waiting for a train to Auschwitz. In 1982, long after the war, the tirelessly litigious Leni sued a documentary maker who suggested that she had known about Auschwitz. She probably didn't know. But she certainly did know that she was employing forced labor; and her claim that she met almost all of the extras after the war was a flat lie.

She lied about everything. She just went on lying until people got tired, or old, or died. One of her most telling lies was the one she told about Streicher. She said that she had loathed him. But there is preserved correspondence to prove that she invited his company and treated him as a close friend until quite late in the war. The idea that Streicher would never mention to her what was happening to the Jews is preposterous. He was proud of it, and was eventually hanged for it.

Leni, although she never managed regret, had enough sense to feign ignorance. But one of her closer questioners got the admission out of her that really mattered. He was Budd Schulberg. His famous days as a screenwriter were still ahead of him, but he would never dream up a neater scene than the one he played out with Leni when he interviewed her in 1945, shortly after her arrest by American soldiers. After unrolling her usual impatient rigmarole about having known nothing about any Nazi atrocities, Leni made the mistake of saying that she sometimes, against her will, had to do what Goebbels wanted, because she was afraid of being sent to a concentration camp. Schulberg asked why she should have been afraid of that, if she didn't know that concentration camps existed.

So there was the whole story. For anyone with a memory for recent events, the question of Leni's moral status was settled. What came next, stretching on to the end of the millennium and now beyond, was the question of her artistic stature, supposedly a different thing. She built another career photographing tribesmen in Africa, and then another one, filming life below the waves in yet another new role as the oldest diver in the world. And as the people with a memory for the real world grew fewer, those who knew about nothing except the movies gradually redefined the issue.

At the end of the first "Star Wars" movie, George Lucas copied the ambience of "Triumph of the Will" with no apparent sense of how he was really proving that the cause in which Luke Skywalker and his friends had just triumphed could not have been worth fighting for. Lucas wasn't alone: Trimborn does a useful job of rounding up the unusual suspects. Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and Madonna all enrolled themselves on the growing list of Leni's fans. So did Siegfried and Roy. Francis Ford Coppola said he admired her. Steven Spielberg said he wanted to meet her. If he had made "Schindler's List" 10 times, he could not have undone the portent of such a wish, because he was really saying that there can be art without a human framework, and that a movie can be made out of nothing but impressive images. Some of Leni's images were indeed impressive. But the question is never about whether or not you are impressed. The question is about whether you can keep your head when you are. Leni Riefenstahl was impressed by the Nazis, and look what happened.

Clive James's latest book, "Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts," has just been published.