Saturday Links
Emily Howes’s “The Painter’s Daughters,” Christianity and modern art, Frank Auerbach’s charcoal heads, Gabriel García Márquez’s last novel, and more.
Good morning! Mark Bostridge reviews Emily Howes’s novel The Painter’s Daughters, which follows the two daughters of the eighteenth-century artist Thomas Gainsborough, who painted several portraits of his daughters (including the one above): “The relationship between the two women offers an ingenious premise for a novel and it’s one that Howes seizes and exploits for all it’s worth. In her fictional retelling, Molly’s mental instability is evident — to Peggy at least — before they reach their teens. Ultimately it’s this secret that keeps the two sisters inseparable. Peggy, known in the family as ‘the Captain’ because of her bossy ways, struggles to hide Molly’s condition from her scolding, socially ambitious mother and loving but distant father, for fear that her elder sister will be sent to an asylum.”
Crawford Gribben reviews Peter K. Andersson’s Fool: In Search of Henry VIII's Closest Man: “Should you answer a fool according to his folly? This question haunts the pages of an erudite new book. Peter K. Andersson, a historian at Örebro University in Sweden, has written a short and delightful account of William Somer, fool to Henry VIII and one of the best-known individuals in Tudor England. Somer was the man with whom the king ‘spent perhaps more time than any other,’ a subject in four royal portraits, and a witness of Elizabeth I’s coronation. He was regarded as a comic genius by William Shakespeare and was remembered in a sequence of seventeenth-century jestbooks and plays. His occasional appearances have continued into Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light (2020). Somer defined the archetype of the fool and became a recognizable figure in his lifetime and beyond. Yet, for all of his visibility, even celebrity, he remains ‘one of the most mysterious individuals’ in early modern England.”
Jonathan Anderson reviews Joseph Masheck’s Faith in Art: Religion, Aesthetics, and Early Abstraction:
As editor in chief of Artforum from 1977 to 1980, Joseph Masheck published a series of five articles tracing ways that twentieth-century abstraction remained subtly rooted in Christian conceptualities and antetypes. With titles like “Cruciformality” and “Iconicity,” these articles were less concerned with religious iconographies (the ubiquity of cross-shaped structures in modernist painting, for example) than with understanding how nonobjective art was (re)processing religious logics, precisely while dispensing with iconographical and pictorial content.
In pursuing these various lines of inquiry, however, Masheck transgressed some affinities and commitments of his readership. Writing in 1993, thirteen years after leaving Artforum, he admitted that his “only real disappointment as editor was the cynical derision that met any religious reference,” which was especially contemptuous in response to those articles. Indeed, precisely as Masheck’s articles ran in Artforum, his former colleague Rosalind Krauss announced in October, in her 1979 article “Grids,” that whatever modernism’s religious connections might be, sustained reflection about them had become “inadmissible” in contemporary art discourse—to the extent that “by now we find it indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence.”
Jeremy Beer writes about one of the American West’s greatest explorers:
Fr. Francisco Garcés’s Indian friends had begged him not to go to Oraibi, Arizona. The Hopis would kill him, they said. But Garcés had been undaunted. For months he had been traveling through the wilderness. Unarmed and hundreds of miles from the nearest Spanish soldier, he might be murdered at any moment. Still, by going to the Hopis’ principal village, he was courting even more danger than usual. Garcés was a Franciscan friar, and the history of his order’s interactions with the Hopis was not a happy one. In 1653, for example, one friar had taken a converted Hopi as his mistress. When a Hopi man began to rally the community against this transgression, the priest had him killed by two native officials. Fearing they would reveal his crimes, he then had those officials hanged. Some years later, another Franciscan drenched several Hopi men with turpentine and set them on fire. As one of his victims ran for a spring to douse the flames, the priest rode him down and killed him. In light of such crimes, it is not surprising that during the region-wide Pueblo Revolt of August 1680 the churches built by the Franciscans on the Hopi mesas were destroyed, and the four friars who served them slain.
Twenty years later, the Franciscans returned to the Hopi village of Awat’ovi. Surprisingly, dozens of the village’s residents accepted baptism and began incorporating Christian devotions into their sacred practices. This was not a development welcomed by their Hopi kin. Warriors from neighboring villages slaughtered Awat’ovi’s residents and laid waste their village. (The ruins can be visited today.) Since that tragedy, at least nine Franciscan priests had visited the Hopis’ homeland. None had succeeded in gaining a foothold for the church.
Francisco Garcés knew this history. But neither the prospect of failure nor that of physical danger had ever deterred him from action. During the previous eight years he had wandered on muleback and foot, often alone, two or three thousand miles through the deserts, highlands, meadows, and mountains of New Spain’s far-northern, unmapped frontier—today’s Sonora, Arizona, Nevada, and California. He had been the first European to enter what became Nevada; the first to descend to the village of Supai in the Grand Canyon; the first to cross the treacherous Colorado desert west of Yuma, Arizona; the first to describe the San Joaquin Valley and its inhabitants; the first to make contact with several Native American peoples; and now the first to enter Hopi territory from the west. In his travels he had unceasingly preached the gospel. He had just as unceasingly sought to serve the interests of his Spanish sovereign. To him, as to every Spaniard he knew, crown and cross were two sides of the same coin.
On re-reading Bernard Malamud: “Born in Brooklyn in 1914, Malamud was the son of impoverished Russian Jewish immigrants burdened by more than their fair share of misfortune. His father ran a failing grocery store, a younger brother was mentally ill, his mother died when Bernard was 15. But he began writing stories as a teenager, got himself educated at City College, worked here and there for a good 10 years while continuing to write in obscurity, and then in his 40s began to publish the novels and stories for which he would become famous. To make a living, Malamud taught writing for some 35 years, first at Oregon State University and then at Bennington College. The moment is propitious for revisiting his work, as the Library of America is now publishing the third and final volume of his collected writings . . . The Israeli writer Amos Elon once wrote that what is most shocking in human history is the patience of the oppressed. It’s hard to say exactly why Malamud’s deceptively simple tales of life among the shopkeeper Jews of Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s remind me of Elon’s striking insight, but they do. There are, of course, his famous stories—‘The Jewbird,’ ‘The Magic Barrel,’ ‘Angel Levine’—in which magic realism is employed to serve as a passionate outcry against the Jewish experience of life denied. And there are the stories that turn on Malamud’s bumbling boy-men in a permanent delirium of sexual hunger, the ones who pant and stutter, tremble and languish, and often, at the crucial moment, fail to perform. The acuteness with which Malamud tracks their farshlepte journey through this vale of tears is, in itself, a literary marvel.”
Poem: Robert Cording, “Clearing Brush”
How a Manchester bartender and part-time male go-go dancer brought Caliban Shrieks back into print:
A writer friend introduced him to John Merrick, an editor for Verso books who was also interested in Hilton. Merrick advised Chadwick to transcribe the text, so Chadwick returned to the library with a laptop. It was slow work and, with an hour-long bus journey back home, inconvenient. “I was supervising a techno club at the time, staying awake pretty much all weekend, sometimes working the doors then performing my go-go act onstage the same night,” he recalled. “Then, during the week I was doing graphic design for a trade union. I was just really knackered.” Chadwick persuaded the librarian to scan the book for him. After a positive test for covid-19 kept him home from work, he finished the transcription within a fortnight.
Next, Chadwick needed to locate the book’s rights holder. Hilton, he knew, had been married twice, but had died childless in 1983. It wasn’t clear to whom, if anyone, Hilton had left his literary estate. Chadwick signed up for a genealogy service and began to search for a will. He was not the only person to have investigated Hilton’s life and legacy. In 2013, while conducting research for a Ph.D. on working-class writing in the twentieth century, a man named Jack Windle visited a woman in Pewsey, Wiltshire, who claimed that she had delivered meals to Hilton when he lived in the village. “Her cottage was full of stuffed animals and her artwork,” Windle recalled. “And she told me that she had found Jack dead.”
Paul A. Rahe reviews Harvey C. Mansfield’s Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: “When, twenty-eight years ago on the eve of his sixty-fifth birthday, Mansfield ushered into print a collection of the essays he had written on the Florentine, one might have been forgiven for thinking that this was his valedictory contribution to the republic of letters. One would certainly not have supposed that in his ninety-second year he would bring forth yet another such volume—but here we have it, in Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World. It has been well worth the wait. These two collections have something in common and should perhaps be read in tandem.”
Michael Prodger writes about Frank Auerbach’s “unsettling” charcoal heads:
Born in Germany in 1931, he was sent to England in 1939 by his parents, who would both die at Auschwitz, leaving him with no financial or emotional buffer in his quest to become a painter. The first 30 years of his career meant warming his hands on an oil stove before he could start work. His method was to paint in oils and if the day’s work displeased him he would scrape it off the canvas and start again. The paint he could barely afford ended up in the bin.
So for him, charcoal was not just a traditional drawing medium – and as an artist reverent about earlier painters that was important – but a matter of economics too. The collection of charcoal heads currently on display at the Courtauld Gallery date from the late 1950s and early 1960s, and are therefore both portraits of individuals who were close to him and works by an artist who knew what financial precariousness was and who feared he might not make a go of things.
A long-lost Gershwin musical has been found: “It’s been almost 100 years since the last recorded production of composer George Gershwin’s musical La La Lucille. After opening on Broadway in 1919 and touring for a few years, its last known production was in Massachusetts in May 1926. It’s since been seen as a lost work of one of the great American musicians.”
WAMU shuts down the DCist: “Station general manager Erika Pulley-Hayes made the announcement during a roughly 10-minute meeting, during which no questions were taken. She told staffers that the shift was part of a new strategy to focus more on audio products rather than the written journalism that WAMU had hoped to bolster when it acquired DCist six years ago.”
Forthcoming: Gabriel García Márquez, Until August: A Novel, translated by Anne McLean (Knopf, March 12): “Constantly surprising, joyously sensual, Until August is a profound meditation on freedom, regret, self-transformation, and the mysteries of love—an unexpected gift from one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.”