Italics are mine

Paris: The Luminous Years, Part 2

The second half of Paris: The Luminous Years documentary focuses on the exhilarating decade of the 1920s, between the end of the Great War and the Wall Street of 1929. Iconic writers such as Joseph Kessel talk about the euphoria of being alive in those post-war years. This was quickly followed by political protests, social upheavals and new movements such as Dada, led by Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara, which became an overnight sensation in Paris and gave artists permission to break all the rules. After violence escalated, Breton decided something more constructive was needed and wrote The Magnetic Fields (pioneering his style of automatic writing, as if in a dream), thus launching Surrealism.

Surrealism's greatest success was among painters such as Rene Magritte, Frida Kahlo and Joan Miro, whose style evolved remarkably fast from the traditional approach shown in The Farm to embrace the abstract features and strong colors that made him famous. The movie then touches upon Marcel Duchamp and his ready-mades.

Then, after one hour and twenty minutes, the best part: the segment on the Americans in Paris. We are told that U.S. soldiers returning to America after the Great War found a highly repressive and restricted society, soon to be in the thralls of Prohibition, and could not return to the City of Lights fast enough. Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921 with his wife Hadley. His years in Paris were later the focus of his memoir A Moveable Feast. Early on he was close friend with Gertrude Stein, until 1925 when Stein refused to write a positive review of In Our Time. 

The movie then drifts away to the topic of American women in Paris, who were fleeing the stifling conventions of life in the U.S. where they were expected to marry and take care of the home, and instead flourished in Saint-Germain-des-Pres - women like Djuna Barnes, Berenice Abbott, Janet Flanner, Romaine Brooks and of course Sylvia Beach, at which point the movie pivots to her bookstore Shakespeare & Company, her relationship with Adrienne Monnier and the controversy surrounding the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. 

Continuing on its enumeration of American women in Paris, the movie shows footage of Josephine Baker, and then transitions to Langston Hughes (not a woman, but American), who found himself a job as a bus boy in one of the most famous jazz clubs in Paris, and incorporated jazz rhythms and sounds in his own writing. The movie stays on the jazz theme by touching upon composers such as Darius Milhaud brought together ideas from jazz and classical music, taking La Creation du Monde as an example, with sets by Fernand Leger.

Then, after a digression on Erik Satie and his being a mentor to young composers, we move on to Aaron Copland, who came to Paris when he was in his twenties to study composition with Nadia Boulanger, with a short segment on Boulanger's Wednesday classes and salons. Then Serge Diaghilev died in August 1929 in Venice, the Wall Street crisis of October 1929 sent most U.S. expatriate artists home, and that was the end of the luminous years. 

The New York Times review of the documentary, back in 2010 when it first aired on PBS, is certainly right that the documentary is at times plodding and didactic, and my notes above and in my previous post show it meanders a lot, pivoting from one story to the next without much overarching theme in its determination to stuff as much art as possible in the two hours of the movie. It is also a pity that the filmmaker didn't spend any time on Chagall, since his artwork graces the cover of the DVD. To keep the movie interesting there is an attempted focus on the artists who made the art, for instance through the soured friendship between Braque and Picasso, but we never spend enough time on one character to really care for that person. On the other hand, many artists in the Paris of the 1920s led fascinating lives and it is a treat to learn a little about so many. The excellent information the movie provides and the images it offers of Paris in its heyday as well as of groundbreaking art make it well worth a watch.

I'll end with a quote by Marc Chagall that is particularly dear to my heart, since I moved to Paris myself when I was young: If I had not gone to Paris, I would not be who I am.

#BeDifferent The Flower Way

Those 2 red flowers at SMU didn't get the memo they were supposed to be white, and I love them for it.

Trip down memory lane

So I returned to the Lehigh Valley this past weekend to attend the performance of Evita and the specialty dinner at Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival. I'm on their board. It made sense I would go. This was the first time I've been back since leaving last year, and I was wondering what I would feel. I did spend 11 years of my life there, not counting the year I was on sabbatical. I might very well never stay in one place so long ever again. And I stepped out of the plane into the airport and I didn't feel anything. I can cry when I read feel-good stories, I can laugh to tears when I watch puppy videos, but I stepped inside the airport terminal and I just thought it looked like just any small-town airport, of dubious architecture, looking a little drab. I walked toward the exit and thought about all the times I had walked past that checkpoint and still didn't feel a thing. As a matter of fact, I had felt more when I had booked the tickets and imagined returning than when I was actually there. I felt like a business visitor landing in a small town for a conference - just something I had to do, and I hoped I'd have a pleasant trip, but that wasn't home anymore and I wasn't even thinking about the fact that it'd ever been home.

What struck me was how rundown everything looked. I didn't remember it like that. Of course there had been many rundown places in the area when I lived there, but I hadn't planning on driving past them. I stayed at the Hyatt Place (the place to stay if you're in that area, in my opinion - great large and modern guestrooms, great breakfast included in the price, great location) so my Uber driver picked me up at the airport and drove the familiar route along Route 378 to the Historic District. I was shocked when we got off the exit at how shabby the houses looked like, and the sidewalks were all uneven with grass growing in-between. This was right behind the historic block with the supposedly tourist attractions. Even the Historic District itself looked drab and dowdy. Not awful - the way the boarded-up furnaces of Bethlehem Steel looked when I first moved to the area and only knew how to go to work using Route 412 - but nothing to go out of your way to see. Some empty stores, some stores with moss on top of their signs, hite walls that had turned to gray, that sort of thing.

I checked in at Hyatt Place and I walked to Moravian Bookstore, which has a lot of home-decoration items on sale and a room full of books. Back in those days I was very proud to live in a city with an independent bookstore. And I still felt like a professional on a business trip - I had no emotion about being in the bookstore - but I also was impressed by the exceptional quality of the books on display. Since the bookstore has little space, the staff has to be very selective in what they put on their shelves, but they have a very strong selection in a wide range of categories, from fiction to history to poetry. They seem to stock a lot of the Indie Best books, so it is no surprise I like their selection so much. I did buy two books from them, although I had brought plenty of reading on the trip, including When the world stopped to listen by Stuart Isacoff (about Van Cliburn winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in April 1958 - Van Cliburn was from Texas and the famous International Cliburn Piano Competition is organized every four years in Fort Worth, TX near where I live now, of course given my love of piano I watched this year's competition and it was amazing, hence, my decision to buy the book. But I digress. Except for that fact that there are many more cultural things to do for me in Dallas.)

Anyway, I like to support independent bookstores, so I'm now the proud owner of LaRose by Louise Erdrich (I still remember picking up The Round House at the Seattle Airport and reading it cover to cover) and Elizabeth: The Later Years by John Guy, about Queen Elizabeth I. Then I went to Apollo Grill and had a kale salad with tuna, like in the old days. It was delicious. In fact it probably remains the best kale salad I've ever eaten, with strawberries, blueberries, gorgonzola cheese, cucumbers, almonds and balsamic dressing. Their bread is very good. I recognized a lot of the staff. 

Two things that struck me when I was walking through Historic Bethlehem were that (i) many people seemed much more overweight and/or seemed to have more health problems than in the area where I live in Dallas, which is admittedly a rather posh and pretentious area, and (ii) many people also seemed to have a far healthier attitude toward clothes and appearances (even the two young women who looked like the absolute sorority girl types - long straight flowing hair, designer's purses, fancy jeans - walked into Apollo Grill in flip flops). In a way, it was as if the health was in the inside. The economy in the LV isn't as good as it should be (it lacks large companies that would provide lots of middle-class jobs for local residents) and a lot of people eat cheap because they can't afford to shop at the more expensive organic stores. I believe that in the long run there are health consequences for, say, eating beef that has been treated with hormones or maybe chicken treated with antibiotics, but some people don't have the luxury of selecting other options. I did find all of them vastly more interesting-looking than the cookie-cutter pseudo-yuppies types. I wish some good companies would finally move to the LV and provide solid employment to a lot of those people, who deserve it. That's what they had when Bethlehem Steel was still around. But perhaps it is unrealistic to hope that companies still behave like that anymore.

My second day I went to Promenade Shops. (I also worked on my novel and a research paper, discovered a new lunch place in the Historic Bethlehem, Cachette, which has a great kale salad with chicken and got a massage at Healing Hands. The reason I arrived a day early is that there was no good weekend flight itinerary on the airline I wanted to fly and I figured I could use some time to work.) I used to go to Promenade Shops almost every week to shop at the organic grocery store (Fresh Market) or get a salad at Cosi - I liked to sit at a high table along the bay window and work on my laptop. I also liked to go to Barnes & Noble. On the way there I had a nice chat with my Uber driver who was telling me she had to go from full time to part time (by doctor's orders) at her job as a packer at a local warehouse because her employer was making her lift 50-100 pounds and that was causing her severe health issues. She said that when another coworker had tried to ask for an improvement they fired her as soon as they could find a reason. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote beautifully about what it is like to be poor in America in Nickel and Dimed many years ago but I still don't think we fully get it, or perhaps things have simply gotten worse for everybody now. I want to read Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city when I get the chance.

At Promenade Shops I went to Barnes & Noble, which was, well, similar to any Barnes & Noble in the nation, except that this one was even more focused on toys and I found its selection not as good as the B&N near Northpark in Dallas. But that bookstore carried me through for many years and I can't criticize it too much. Promenade Shops only opened in December 2006 and my first 2 1/2 years in the LV were, shall I say, a completely different experience, and not in a good way. I was really glad to have it for about 10 years. Then I went to Melt, and the lump crab cake salad with avocado was excellent, although I'm not sure why things are called salads when they don't have greens. And on the way back I looked around me at the road I had taken so many times to go home from Promenade Shops, and the foliage along the road could have used some cutting, and the cars parked in the grass looked beaten up, and I didn't remember there was a Dollar Tree store in the small shopping center along the road. Yet, one thing that appealed to me when I moved there (because I'm full of contradictions) is precisely that it reminded me of my maternal grandmother's small town. 

The third day I went to the Evita-inspired specialty dinner at the Shakespeare Festival, followed by a performance of Evita, and that deserves its own post. The DeSales campus was absolutely gorgeous, and the performance phenomenal. In a way, DeSales was my home during my time in the LV much more than Lehigh was.

When people in Texas talk about Bethlehem as a small town I tend to correct them - it's bigger than a small town - but when I saw what it was, with the distance that the year away has given me, I had to admit it very much looked like a small town. While I lived there perhaps I convinced myself that it was way better than it was. Just about everybody wants to find something positive about where they live, even if they end up spending most of their time in New York City. The contrast with my neighborhood in Dallas has been quite eye-opening. Or perhaps the lack of good jobs has taken its toll. Sometimes you don't notice things change around you when you live somewhere because you see the place every day. I still wonder how the blue-collar hard-working people of the LV are going to have the opportunities they deserve and send their kids off to college, even community college. (The area has become a distribution hub, but a lot of the warehouse jobs are minimum wage.) I so wish I had witnessed a renaissance of the area while I was there, and some pockets have done well, such as the Center Valley area, but I don't think the LV has done as well as it should have.

I do love the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, incidentally located in Center Valley - one thing Dallas doesn't do as well as the LV is Shakespeare, and the LV has the extremely talented folks at DeSales and PSF to thank for that. I plan on coming back. There is, after all, still one key advantage to Bethlehem compared to Dallas, even keeping in mind that Bethlehem has humid heat rather than the much-preferred Dallas dry heat: the temperatures weren't hitting 100 this weekend. 

Jiri Belohlavek, 71, Czech Philharmonic Conductor

 A few days ago I learned that Jiri Belohlavek had died. I actually heard the news one month to the day since I had seen him conduct the Czech Philharmonic at Prague's Rudolfinum, in a masterful performance of Mozart's Violin Concerto No 5 featuring Nikolaj Znaider and Mahler's Symphony No 5. I hadn't known he was sick, although it was clear when I saw him in Prague that he was recovering from a serious illness: he had lost so much weight and the trademark chock-full of hair I had grown accustomed to seeing, from picking up my favorite CD set [the Complete Dvorak Symphonies and Concertos, with cover pictured to the left], had disappeared.

Since his contract with the Czech Philharmonic had been renewed earlier this year, I hoped that his illness was behind me and that I would be able to attend another concert by him were I to return to Prague, which I hope to, some day. In fact I chose the dates of this trip to attend a performance by Belohlavek. That was one of my requirements: I would not go all the way to Prague for my first trip ever without attending a performance by the maestro with the Czech Philharmonic. And I'm just so glad I made it happen. The concert was almost sold-out when I bought the ticket, the same evening I booked the plane tickets and the hotel. I will always cherish the memories of that concert.

Belohlavek has done so much to raise the profile of Czech music and the Czech Philharmonic. Thanks to him I discovered much great Czech music I didn't know before, such as Martinu's Piano Concertos. His Dvorak moved me like no other conductor's can, and it is only fitting that I am listening to the CD1 of his Dvorak's Symphonies (Symphony 1 and Cello Concerto featuring Alisa Weilerstein) as I type this. I don't remember being so stunned and sad by the passing of someone I didn't know personally since the death of David Halberstam, ten years ago. But we can all be grateful for what he did to advance classical music.  

A side note about the New York Times and Washington Post obituaries, available here and here, respectively. I have included screenshots below. The NYT went with an older picture of Belohlavek (from 2008), which would be familiar to the music amateurs around the world who own his records. In it he is strong and vigorous. It resembles the one on the cover of my Dvorak Symphonies set. The one in the WaPo obituary is more recent, and matches the Belohlavek I saw when I went to Prague. There isn't much resemblance between the two, is it? And I was thinking, I doubt he wants us to remember him with the WaPo picture. But I will always remember him from the covers of his CDs anyway.

Finally, I have to wonder if he already knew he was about to die when he gave that concert of Mozart and Mahler at the Rudolfinum. He looked frail, but his conducting was not frail. I remember the enormous standing ovation we gave him at the end - Europeans, contrary to Americans, are much more parsimonious in their acclaim, but everyone was on their feet - and how touched he was when he faced us, even bringing his hand to his heart. My opinion (without proof) is that he knew, but music carried him forward as long as it could. "Music is my life," the WaPo reports him to have said. I hope he knew how much we love him and are grateful to him for making music our lives too.

Paris: The Luminous Years, Part 1

This documentary about Paris in the early twentieth century (subtitled: Toward the Making of the Modern) offers outstanding insights into cultural life in the city at a time where it drew artists and intellectuals of all nationalities and held the place in the world that New York has today. The movie lasts two hours and the first time I watched it, it only started holding my interest at the half way point when World War I breaks out: Germans like art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler are suddenly deemed enemies of France, which frightens the Cubist painters he represented and incites many to suddenly adopt a much more traditional style, at least for a few years. From then on, the documentary was spellbinding. I wanted to watch it again and the second time, I found even the beginning about Picasso - who is not a painter I particularly care for, being staunchly on the Matisse and Braque side of that debate - because the filmmakers interview many art scholars whose expertise really sets this documentary apart, and I enjoyed those parts more once I was sure the whole movie was not going to be about Picasso and his friends.

The movie uses many photographs and (for its second half) movies of the times, which vividly capture the atmosphere in Paris when it was an international mecca for the arts. It starts with Paris in the 1900s, with a focus on Montmartre, famous for the bohemian lifestyle and the sense of community among local artists who included Pablo Picasso, Andre Derain and Georges Braque, some of whom lived at the Bateau-Lavoir (Picasso had his studio there from 1904 to 1910). The movie dwells upon the group of friends Picasso had (Andre Salmon, Guillaume Apollinaire), who were all poets except for painter Georges Braque.

Around 1910, the center of Parisian artistic life moved from Montmartre on the Right Bank of the Seine to Montparnasse on the Left Bank, with painter Marc Chagall for instance having a studio in La Ruche. Artists such as Amadeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, Jacques Lipschitz, Ossip Zadkine assiduously frequented Montparnasse. Those artists, though, didn't identify with a specific -ism (Impressionism, Fauvism) and were disdained by the professors who prepared for the prizes at the very academic (read: traditional) oriented Salon. La Ruche had a striking effect on these young painters' work, as evidenced by many stills of their artwork shown in the movie. 

We are also treated to many thoughtful interview segments by Romy Golan, a professor of 20th century European Art at CUNY Graduate Center, and Noel Riley Fitch, who wrote Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation. Riley Fitch explains the importance of the cafe as a gathering spot providing heat, food and restrooms and an opportunity for discussions on culture and politics, to circumvent French laws (at the time) against group meetings. But the most compelling testimonials for me were - through archival footage - of artists who had lived through that period, such as Jean Cocteau and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. 

 

 

 

 

The documentary spends some time on the Salon d'Automne of 1905, with its canvases by Matisse, Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck (showing my favorite painting in all of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Seine at Chatou.) We see Matisse's Woman with a Hat, which was on the cover of the exhibition The Steins Collect at the Metropolitan Museum, back in 2012, and took much abuse from outraged salon-goers back in 1905. Georges Braque himself discovered the vibrant colors of Fauvism in 1905 and was soon converted, selling all 6 of his Fauvist paintings at the Spring Salon. The movie then discusses Braque's discovery of Cezanne, the 1907 retrospective of Cezanne's work, which had a definite influence on Matisse's work and in fact any modern artist. There are also mentions and pictures of Gertrude Stein, who bought Matisse's Woman with a Hat and viewed her writing as a literary form of Cubism.

1907 is the year of Matisse's Blue Nude and Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, although that painting won't be shown for four more years. It is also the year where art dealer Kahnweiler introduced Braque to Apollinaire and Apollinaire introduced Braque to Picasso. In 1908, Kahnweiler exhibited Braque's paintings in his gallery and the critic Louis de Vauxcelles, who had already named Impressionism and Fauvism, came up with the name Cubism to characterize his work. Only Picasso could understand Braque's work. They then went their own way and when they got back together, realized their style had evolved the same way. You can judge for yourself if you can find a copy of Braque and Picasso: Pioneering Cubism (I bought my own copy some years ago before it went out of print), which accompanied the landmark 1989 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, described in the New York Times as "the show of the decade." 

42 minutes into the documentary, the focus shifts to Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, which provided a meeting ground for dancers, choreographers, scene designers, painters, musicians. Diaghilev oversaw the elevation of the role of the male dancer in ballet and the creation of roles for Vaslav Nijinsky, his lover, who starred in the controversial Afternoon of a Faun. Picasso himself was linked to the Ballets Russes through the sets and costumes he designed as well as his marrying one of their dancers, Olga Khokhlova. The movie mentions the composers associated with the Ballets Russes (Prokofiev, Ravel, de Falla, Satie, Debussy), the scandal of Rite of Spring, and the falling out between Diaghilev and Nijinsky after the latter gets married, which brought Leonid Massine to the Ballets Russes instead. 

Then, around 57 minutes into the movie, World War I (then called the Great War) breaks out. The footage of war trenches is impressive, and the situation gut-wrenching. Braque and Derail were called up. Many foreign artists volunteered (Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Ossip Zadkine), but Pablo Picasso did not, which prompted many accusations of cowardice toward him from his former friends. Foreigners became suspect and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's paintings were confiscated by the French government. Cubist painters were accused of being an instrument of German propaganda and foreign artists hastened to return to a more traditional style to avoid getting in trouble.

In Winter 1915, Jean Cocteau decided to involve Picasso in a project, Parade, for the Ballets Russes, with music composed by Erik Satie. (Cocteau wrote the scenario.) This led to yet another scandal. Guillaume Apollinaire, wounded at the front, attended the premiere and helped protect his friends, but died in November 1918 during the Spanish flu epidemic. 

The first half of the documentary ends after about one hour and five minutes, when the 1920s begin. I liked the first part enough but found the second part fascinating, and it deserves a blog post in its own right. In the meantime, I hope this short summary of the first half of the movie will incite my readers to purchase the DVD. The value of the movie isn't in the facts it relates, which are well-known to anyone who cares about Paris and 20th century modern art, but the actual pictures, movies, testimonials it provides - things that have to be seen and heard first-hand.