Italics are mine

Review of "Hold Still" by Sally Mann

I picked up this book, in its hardcover version, after my latest visit at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. I had actually never heard of Sally Mann before, but I loved the large number of color and black-and-white photographs in the book (at least in the hardcover version, the reproductions were of high quality although they were integrated to the text instead of being on separate pages.) The book was very well written and it provided good insights into her life up to 2015 - her son committed suicide about a year later so that is not in the book - but, in spite of her friendship with fellow Lexington, Va. local Cy Twombly, the fact remains that she doesn't quite have the sort of life and career that would lend itself to a full-length memoir so she has to spend a lot of the book on her parents, photos included, and the black woman who raised her as a child. I actually liked a lot the part about her interactions, as a young white girl, with black folks, which was written with great sensitivity, and the part about her elderly father committing suicide. Regarding the controversy of the pictures of her naked young children, I felt she was a bit naive not to expect what happened, but if you live on a farm in a place like Lexington, Va, it is probably easy to forget there are weirdos out there. So, the book is well-done and the stunning pictures will certainly inspire many photographers, but I did skip some pages about her parents, especially before she was born. Hence, the rating of four starts out of five. Definitely worth a look/read.   

Iconic Painter: "Alice Neel"

For some reason I had never heard about Alice Neel before I watched this DVD (and I love Abstract Expressionism), but I was taken aback by her masterful portraits and her complicated life. One of her kids died in infancy. Her husband took her baby girl to Cuba to introduce her to his parents in the hope they would give the family money, and didn't bring her back. (That girl, Isabella, committed suicide in 1982, two years before her mother's death.) And yet she emerged as one of the most original portrait artists of the twentieth century. Did trauma help her view the world differently, or was she naturally so inclined? The movie doesn't explain it, yet it provides a very good description of her life and work. Plus, New York City. No way I wasn't going to like this. Five stars, obviously.

Virtual New York City weekend

A few weeks ago I was supposed to New York City for a long weekend. I was really looking forward to it, since my kind of people are in NYC rather than in Dallas. (I like the things of Dallas, the museum, the symphony, the indie bookstores, the restaurants, but I need to go to NYC once in a while.) Needless to say, the pandemic put a brutal end to any hope I had of going. So I figured for this post I would daydream about what I would have done if I had gone. 

I was supposed to land on Friday afternoon, and on Friday evening I was going to see Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Booth Theatre. I've loved this play since I've seen the movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, although I was never particularly fond of black and white movies that are black and white on purpose when they could have been in color. The show closed during previews when Broadway was shut down, so it never got to premiere, but what a cast it would have been: Laurie Metcalfe as Martha, Rupert Everett as George, Joe Mantello directing. I hope they film it for television to recoup their costs. The play has so much to say about thwarted ambitions and pent-up anger and outright delusions.

The following day, I was going to go and see the Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art exhibition at the Whitney, and of course I couldn't be in that neighborhood without stopping at the Rubin. Maybe the Whitney show will be rescheduled (the website says "dates to be announced") but I'm not sure I'll be able to get back to New York any time soon so I got myself the catalog of the exhibition instead. Thank you, online shopping. That evening I was going to attend the New York Philharmonic concert conducted by Jaap van Zweden himself (the music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra before he got the NYC job) with Mahler's First on the program and Daniil Trifonov playing Mozart.

The next day I was going to attend a matinee at the Metropolitan Opera of Maria Stuarda. This was one of the last operas I saw at the Met before I moved to Texas and I was truly amazed by the set and the voices, so I wanted to see it again and relive the magic. This was not to be. That day I would also have gotten brunch and/or dinner  with local friends, or perhaps a friend down from Boston. I miss face-to-face interactions. Some other time, I suppose. 

Then on Monday I was going to see the Dorothea Lange: Words and Pictures exhibit at MoMA and attend the lecture at the New York Historical Society (Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition and American Complacency). None of that came to pass, obviously, but I ordered the Lange catalog in another round of online shopping from Dallas. As of this writing, the Lange exhibition is supposed to open online instead. 

I suppose I would have eaten on the Upper West Side at Irving Farm Coffee Roasters, Sweetgreen and Nice Matin. I suppose I would have had a wonderful time, if the pandemic had not struck. But with the pandemic of course the trip was out of the question. Better to stay safe, and read those museum catalogs from Dallas instead. 

Review of "Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture"

The other day I watched this documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright's mentor Louis Sullivan, who designed several of the most noteworthy skyscrapers in Chicago at the end of the 19th century. I was going to write "who had such an impact on the Chicago skyline" or something of that order, but the truth is, Sullivan - who had been so convinced as a teenager that he was bound to great things - never achieved the impact he thought should have been his. First of all, he had a credential problem. He dropped out of MIT after only one year to go and study at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, which he promptly quit as well, but he was fortunate to have Dankmar Adler take him under his wing and make his partner at his architecture firm, Adler & Sullivan. He drew art-deco plans for some very visible buildings in Chicago, showing great artistry and craftsmanship in the details of the ornamentation on the facades such as the Auditorium Building in Chicago.

Yet, his ideas did not gain the followership he had hoped for, The Chicago Exhibition of 1893 in "The White City" drew his outrage because he had hoped to define a uniquely American style (as he did for his contribution to the exhibition) but the other architects had aligned themselves on a bland European, Beaux-Arts style. Sullivan's career faded after that, experiencing only a brief resurgence when he was asked to draw plans for a number of small-town banks, stunning in their vanguard design although they must have looked like eyesore to some of the residents. One element I liked in this movie is that sometimes failure comes through no fault of the protagonist and even talented people may not always recover from bad luck, in spite of their great contributions to their profession.

In fact, a 1986 New York Times review of a biography of Sullivan's had the headline: "Genius was not enough." Here is an excerpt from the first paragraph: "One of the masters of the late 19th-century Chicago School of skyscraper architecture, Sullivan was acclaimed in his halcyon days as one of the world's greatest architectural designers. Yet by the time his life ended, he had slipped into poverty and neglect. In this long awaited biography, the historian Robert Twombly explores the architect's rise and fall with thoroughness and sensitivity."

Interestingly, Sullivan married only late (at age 44) and that marriage only lasted a couple of years. The movie says that nothing remains that could document the relationship he had with his wife. Sullivan doesn't seem to have had any hobby besides architecture. The NYT review summarizes some of Twombly's ideas on the topic, which to me sounded like a stretch. (Basically he thinks that Sullivan was a closeted homosexual and that the facades of his buildings reflect his ideas on male-ness and female-ness.) Maybe Sullivan just didn't like people that much. The movie doesn't suggest he had a rich social life. The movie, in fact, steers clear from any discussion of his personal life except for the brief mention of his wife, which is probably the best approach to take here. In the end, we should focus on his legacy, his buildings, his contribution to American architecture. You can see some of his work in this Dwell feature on Adler & Sullivan.

What advice can Sullivan's life provide to talented Millenials hoping to change the world? First, the obvious awareness that they may achieve great things and yet not have an always-ascending career trajectory, that in fact their career may nosedive after their great achievements, and that they should be willing to take on lesser assignments if that happens. But second, the fact that Sullivan didn't compromise for his art, didn't sugar-coat it in an attempt to win contracts away from his competitors (a few of whom are mentioned in the movie). True originality comes at a price. Breakthrough thinkers and innovators may not be recognized or praised during their lifetime. In fact they may be ignored or ridiculed, and the story doesn't necessarily have a happy ending. Many of the buildings Adler & Sullivan had designed in Chicago were demolished in the 1950s and 1960s, so we cannot take comfort in the thought that his work lived on after he passed. (Only 30 of his buildings are said to remain today, out of almost ten times as many.)

Many Millenials have been taught that they could achieve anything, that they could change their circumstances with enough positive thinking and grit. They can certainly strive for that - not trying will not help - but things are more complicated than that. The most we're ready to accept as a society when it comes to failure is that some entrepreneurs may fail many times before they succeed. But guess what? Some entrepreneurs fail many times and never succeed. And some entrepreneurs may succeed once and then fail - a galling thought for people who once had fame and wealth within reach and saw it slip away, condemned to remember their days of glory but never to experience them again. To Sullivan's credit, though, he took the job of drawing plans for small-town bank branches very seriously and never seemed to believe it was beneath him. He used it to express his vision of American architecture, and perhaps travelers pay more attention to those buildings when they arrive in those small towns than to the Sullivan buildings in Chicago, in a neighborhood so rich with magnificent buildings from all kinds of architecture firms. 

Next I want to watch Philip Johnson: Diary of an eccentric architect and read Johnson's biography by Dallas resident Mark Lamster, which is a finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award. For some other posts of mine on architecture, you can read this on Frank Lloyd Wright, this on Fallingwater (a house he designed in Pennsylvania) and that on Eero Saarinen, whose Kresge Auditorium at MIT I so loved.   

Musings on Esteban Vicente

Two years ago shortly after moving to Dallas I discovered Abstract Expressionist Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) in an exhibition at SMU's Meadows Museum, about which I blogged here. I have come to adore his paintings, and as the true nerd/scholar that I am, when I truly like something I enjoy buying multiple books by different authors on the topic to see how various writers approach the subject.

(Another example is my current interest in World War II hero and U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, about whom I possess no fewer than three biographies. One of my great pastimes is to read various famous episodes of his life in all three books to see the differences in their treatment. Next in line for a similar treatment is conductor extraordinaire Leonard Bernstein, when I'm not busy listening to his recordings of Copland's Symphony No 3 and Appalachian Spring. I'm a nerd at heart, what can I say. More on Eisenhower and Bernstein some other day.)  

Vicente had already been the object of a survey at the Meadows Museum back in 2011, long before Dallas was on my radar, but at the bottom right of the picture above you can see a thoughtful monograph about Vicente for the exhibition, written by the late, brilliant Nicole Atzbach, whom I briefly knew before her untimely passing in 2017, which combines an overview of his life with high-quality reproductions of some of his works and those of artists who have inspired him.

The book on the left is the catalog of the exhibition as put together by New York University's Grey Art Gallery, where the retrospective originated (Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture). I particularly enjoyed the fact that the catalog is bilingual -- English and Spanish -- and provides thoughtful interviews with well known artists who were closely connected with Vicente, and the reproductions are outstanding.

Top right is a book about Esteban Vicente by renowned art historian, Pulitzer-Prize winner and Bard Professor Elizabeth Frank, which I got on Amazon.com after discovering Esteban Vicente because I was looking for a book that would contain both essays and great reproductions of his paintings. Each of those three books makes a different contribution to the body of knowledge on Vicente, who deserves to be better known. He wasn't a tormented soul like Jackson Pollock but instead was described by the New York Times as "tall and slim with a reserved, patrician manner." This probably didn't help his fame one bit, but at least we get to focus on his art rather than remembering his antics or the way he died, as we remember Jackson Pollock's. Nothing really distracts from his paintings, and collages, and sculptures.

There is a lesson to be learned, though, regarding who becomes user-famous (Rothko, de Kooning), who doesn't and how some of them played their cards to become household names. His New York Times obit argues that he borrowed liberally from other artists, suggesting that his work was derivative of more original colleagues, but I disagree with that last part. I think certain artists fit more the mold of what the media wanted to promote, especially when it came to the "macho men" of Abstract Expressionism, and Vicente paid a price for not fitting that mold. (Women abstract expressionists painters paid a price too. You can read more about them and a great book about them in this old blog post of mine.) Museum curators such as Nicole Atzbach and art historians such as Elizabeth Frank should be commended for making sure that Esteban Vicente isn't forgotten. 

Here is an example of painting by Vicente owned by SMU Meadows Museum, and here is a link to his New York Times obituary in January 2001.

A Dali retrospective is currently on view at the Meadows Museum until early January, to be followed by an exhibition about Spanish painter Mariana Fortuny y Marsal. Come by if you can.

Trip to Santa Fe 2018

This summer I decided to return to Santa Fe. I had only been there once before, back in 2011, for the opera and chamber music festivals, and this time around I decided to explore the area around Santa Fe rather than just the touristy, historic part of town, although I did return to the opera festival too, on the outskirts of town. (The chamber music festival hadn't started yet when I was there.)

The main reason I decided to go was to follow in the footsteps of painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), for whom I have tremendous admiration. She first discovered New Mexico in 1929 before settling there permanently in 1949 after her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s death in 1946, and spending the last 37 years of her life alternating between Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch depending on the season. O’Keeffe was a pioneer in many respects and didn’t fit an easy mold. She stood out even before she became famous: for instance as a young woman she taught in Texas at a time where people dismissed everything that didn’t happen in New York as unimportant and she wasn't afraid of raising eyebrows with her dark, austere clothing and her (much less austere) behavior with eligible men. She developed her own unique signature style (if you're still reading this post you're probably aware that she is particularly well known for her flowers) and yet also she didn't paint flowers forever and reinvented herself at multiple junctures in her life. She enjoyed alone time far into nature – and nature there wasn’t, say, the Hamptons outside New York, but the arid and unwelcoming Abiquiu area. She didn't follow fads or trends. She made her life work on her own terms.

Visiting the Georgia O’Keeffe museum again counted as a highlight of the trip. I had been very disappointed in the museum, nestled in the historic part of Santa Fe, when I had visited in 2011 because it showed very few paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, but the museum curators have now developed a brilliant retrospective of O’Keeffe’s work (the new exhibit has only been open for a year or two), which gives an outstanding overview of O’Keeffe’s development as an artist. Perhaps O’Keeffe’s life resonates more with me now that I’ve moved to Texas. I also enjoyed her retrospective at the de Young museum in San Francisco back in 2014, but any exhibition of part of her works pales in comparison to what is on display in Santa Fe. The museum also has prepared a great timeline of O'Keeffe's life, which you can enjoy here.

Then, Ghost Ranch. The tour itself was quite good (it showed the landscapes that have inspired O’Keeffe’s paintings, and the tour guide had reproductions of the corresponding paintings as well so we could see first-hand the simplifications or slight changes that O’Keeffe made to focus on what was important in an image), but the drive to Abiquiu was even better. The picture above is one I took during the drive to Abiquiu. I recommend stopping by the Abiquiu Inn for lunch. I wonder how it must have felt to live so far away from most people, back in the 1950s and the 1960s.

The drive through Taos’s High Country also offered some stunning views of New Mexico and glimpses into areas of stark beauty but also stark poverty. I am not much of a church person but the church of Chimayo, famed for its holy dirt, was worth the stop. The Taos Pueblo also remains a highlight of that day. I also saw the Rio Grande Gorges, with very little water due to the drought. For lunch I recommend stopping at Bella’s Mexican Grill in Abiquiu. Both the salad (I think it was the elote salad with shrimp) and the tableside guacamole were exceptionally good.

I returned to the Santa Fe Opera as well. In a 2010 stunning production by the late Lee Blakeley, Madame Butterfly, which opened the festival when it was first launched in 1957 and when it re-opened after a devastating fire, had all the hallmarks of productions I love, with exquisite lighting, outstanding voices, spare sets and rather monochromatic props (in this case inspired of Japanese art), but in addition to the magnificent singing by Kelly Kaduce as Cio-Cio San (the tenor singing Pinkerton didn’t quite have her vocal range and the audience let it be known at the end that it wasn’t pleased), I loved most sitting in the first row of the mezzanine and observing the headlights of the cars go by in the far distance of the mountain range. The theater’s opening in the back on the range offered a spellbinding spectacle.

I also saw Doctor Atomic. I had never seen it (I usually don’t care much for operas sing in English) but the opportunity to see it next to the Los Alamos National Laboratory was hard to pass up. It was very good. I did like Madame Butterfly better. I also went on a backstage tour of Santa Fe Opera, which perhaps could have provided a few more insights and, disappointingly, didn’t allow the group to go anywhere near the performance hall or the stage because a rehearsal was in progress.  

For accommodations, I couldn’t have imagined a better place to stay than the Eldorado Hotel, with its back entrance just feet from the Georgia O’Keeffe museum. The breakfast restaurant prepared an outstanding egg-white omelet, although staff tended to be slow in the cooking and the service. Thankfully I was never in a rush. I loved that my room had a fireplace and a balcony. I got lucky without knowing it because I booked the trip with a check-out date that happened to be the day that the governors’ association was coming to the hotel for its big meeting, so guests couldn’t stay beyond that for security reasons, which meant a number of people staying in Santa Fe past that day had picked other hotels for their entire trip, leaving people like me with really pretty rooms in spite of my booking the trip a bit last minute. (I also appreciated the direct flights from Dallas.) For dinner I adored TerraCotta Wine Bistro. A glass of cabernet sauvignon and the best tomato, cucumber and watermelon salad I've ever eaten with the most delicious freshly baked bread: total bliss. Second choice was La Casa Sena, especially for its wasabi crab salad.

True to myself, I prepared for the trip by buying a lot of books about O’Keeffe and dusting off a volume I had about Santa Fe Opera as well as some books about O’Keeffe I had bought a while back. I also added a few O’Keeffe monographs to my collection during the trip. (See below for the book covers.) I came back with Native American artwork and artifacts, books about O’Keeffe, many remarkable memories and – after bringing my sketchbook and pencils to New Mexico with me for a few quick sketches – a commitment to start drawing and painting again on a more regular basis. This was a good trip.

 

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Women of Abstract Expressionism

I am currently reading a biography of Jackson Pollock, who cultivated an image of macho painter extraordinaire, and given the events in the news, I've been thinking about how rarely we talk today of women painters of the 1950s and how history tends to remember men more.

But abstract expressionism wasn't limited to the artwork of men like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning - male painters who made a point of showing that hard-drinking, women-loving men could also be exceptional painters of great creativity. In spite of the January 1951 "Irascibles" picture in Time magazine showing the Abstract Expressionists as a group of male artists (with the one female exception the now largely forgotten Hedda Sterne), the movement also attracted many female members, who developed their own original signature styles and made great contributions to the art scene of the 1950s. While many have today sunk into the same oblivion as Hedda Sterne, a captivating monograph, which accompanied and extended the exhibition at the Denver Art Museum in the summer of 2016, argues that they deserve far greater fame in a convincing and thorough manner. It does this not only through the excellent scholarly essays, but also through the high-quality reproduction of many women artists' paintings, which make the tendency of museums today to focus only on the crowd-pleasing famous canvases at the expense of lesser-known great art appear incredibly short-sighted.

Of course, most people interested in abstract expressionism know about Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler. But many more women made substantial contributions to the leading artistic movement in the post-war United States. My favorite part of the book was the section on selected biographies at the end, with each woman painter having one page containing a short bio and either a face shot and a reproduction of her art, or one photograph showing her in her studio. I did wish we had been told more about the sort of life they led, their friendships, struggles and loves, a bit like Notable American Women, which does an outstanding job imparting a lot of information on each woman profiled in only a few tight paragraphs. But this is better than nothing. My favorite painters in the book are Grace Hartigan, Buffie Johnson and Jane Wilson. 

The stories of those women's marginalization in the art scene are well documented in the book, in particular in Joan Marter's essay "Missing in Action". By documenting the variety of their styles, their originality and their lasting influence, this survey of the women in the abstract expressionism movement hopefully will (take a first step toward) giv(ing) them the place in history they deserve. 

"Pink, White and Blue (Akhmatova 3)"

 I finally finished another of my "brick poem" paintings. As you might remember, I take poems I like by Anna Akhmatova (in their English translation), and the space on the right - in blue here - represents the white spaces at the end of the poem's lines, and each rectangle is for a word of the poem. I used the same canvas size (24x30) and poem as for Akhmatova 2 (To the Muse), which saved me some prep time in drawing the rectangles, although not much.

I started Akhmatova 3 shortly after I moved to Dallas, painted the blue and the dark red/pinks, and then left it half finished for many months. When I went back to it I went a little fast so it doesn't look as polished as it could be, but at least I finished it, which is more than I can say of my novel in progress.

Eero Saarinen

 "Eero Saarinen: The Architect who Saw the Future", in PBS's American Masters series, provides a well-researched introduction to Saarinen's work, but that is not what makes this movie exceptional. The best documentaries weave a human-interest story into their narrative, and "Eero Saarinen" is no exception.

In fact, it weaves two: the competition between Eero and his father Eliel, also a famous architect (Eero really only came into his own as an architect after Eliel's death in 1950), and the attempt by Eero's son from his first marriage, Eric, who is director of photography of this movie, to better understand this father he knew so little by going to see the buildings Eero built. (Not only did Eero spend most of his time at the office when he was married to Eric's mother, but he then divorced to marry someone else and died in 1961 at age 51 during surgery to remove a brain tumor.) Twice in the movie Eric describes the experience of making the movie as cathartic. He leads the viewer through a chronological exploration of Eero's work.

We are treated to spellbinding analyses of monuments such as the St Louis Arch, the TWA terminal at JFK Airport, a private house (the Miller House), Kresge Auditorium at MIT, Ingall's Rink at Yale, Morse and Stiles College at Yale, the North Christian Church in Columbus, Ind, the Washington Dulles airport, as well as Eero Saarinen's foray into furniture making with Charles Eames. This is an excellent introduction to Saarinen's work with great insights into what made it visionary. The documentary also provides good biographical information on Saarinen, from his work in the shadow of his father until the latter's death to his first marriage to Lilian Swann and his second marriage to Aline Bernstein, an art critic who played a key role promoting his work.

The Kresge Auditorium at MIT was the first modern building I ever saw when I arrived in the United States back in 1999. I was always fond of it as a symbol to human creativity and ingenuity, as well as a place where I listened to many of my friends play in the student orchestras. As a result, I have long been an admirer of Saarinen's work, and I enjoyed this opportunity to put the auditorium in the broader perspective of Saarinen's life and work. One can only wonder what additional marvels Saarinen would have dreamt up if he had not died so young.

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.