At the Art Institute of Chicago

The most exciting things at the Art Institute of Chicago right now: not the big Magritte exhibit but the photographs of Josef Koudelka and the weavings of Ethel Stein. The first exhibit is in black and white; the second, in color, many colors.

Reality, in my experience, trumps surrealism every time. Witness this Koudelka photograph.

And here’s a short film about Stein: Ethel Stein, weaver.

[Wallace Stevens: “The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover.” (Materia Poetica, 1940). I don’t mean to pit artist against artist. I’m only pointing out that I found work of much greater interest in the quieter areas of the museum.]

Archive and ark

It occurred to me when Elaine and I were in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago: the nouns archive and ark both have to do with containing and protecting. They must have a common origin. Right?

No, not right.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives this etymology for archive :

French archif, archive, < late Latin archīum, archīvum, < Greek ἀρχεῖον magisterial residence, public office, < ἀρχή government

And for ark:

Common Germanic: with Old English arc (earc, ærc, erc, erk), accusative arce, compare Old Frisian erke, Old High German archa, modern German arche, Old Norse örk (genitive arkar), Swedish, Danish ark, Gothic and Germanic arka, probably < Latin arca chest, box, coffer

What about arche- of, say, archetype? From the Greek ἀρχι-, first.

And arch?

< Old French arche < Latin arca chest, coffer; also, through some confusion, used in Old French for arc < Latin arcum bow

So it’s arch and and ark that share an ancestor. And stranger still: the OED gives “archive” as one of the meanings of arch: “The civile law . . . was laid up . . . in their Arches.”

I want to go back to Los Angeles, before I had time to look up this stuff.

Naked City TL

Lieutenant Mike Parker (Horace McMahon) is on the telephone with Chief of Detectives Hank Mulvaney (Paul Larsen). It’s serious business:

“Before we get to that, Mike, I’ve got a TL for you.”

A what?

“A what?”

My thoughts exactly.

“That’s what my kids call them, a TL. I don’t know what the letters stand for, but it means that I’ve got a compliment for you if you can dig up something nice to say about me.”

But they turn to the more serious matter. This bit of dialogue, from the Naked City episode “Man without a Skin” (February 6, 1963), sent me off running. TL stands for trade-last. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word in this way:

n. U.S. a compliment offered in exchange for one that is directed towards the speaker; also, in weakened sense, a compliment, whether reciprocal or not

On these terms, a TL is might be something like “Oh, I like your hat too.” Webster’s Third gives a more limited and more interesting meaning:

n -s : a complimentary remark by a third person that a hearer offers to repeat to the person complimented if the latter will first report a compliment made about the hearer

I like this definition, which suggests fabrication, hearsay, and the extortionist element in youthful apologizing: I’ll apologize to you if you’ll apologize to me first. Two of the six OED citations for trade-last suggest reciprocity, but none suggest the you-first element of the Webster’s definition. Does “offered in exchange” in the OED definition mean “given in exchange,” or “promised in exchange”? Did trade-last come to have a much more limited meaning in mid-century U.S. culture? Beats me. But kids — somebody’s kids — have been giving TLs for a long time. The OED dates the word to 1891.

There are forty-seven Naked City posts in Orange Crate Art. This has been one of them.

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

Foreign Correspondent Mongol

[From Foreign Correspondent (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1940. Click for larger views.]

Stebbins (Robert Benchley) is a do-nothing foreign correspondent. By the end of the film, he’s reduced to taking dictation. But at least he has a good pencil to work with. Yes, that’s a Mongol.

And if you’re skeptical, I’ll quote my wife Elaine Fine: “The important thing is that we know it’s a Mongol.” The ferrule gives it away.

Foreign Correspondent is available from the Criterion Collection, beautifully restored. The second of these screenshots though comes from YouTube: my library’s DVD is already damaged, and VLC won’t play the entire film.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard)

Pocket notebook sighting: Foreign Correspondent

My affection for Foreign Correspondent (1940) is at least partly a matter of its being my first Alfred Hitchcock film, or one of the first. (Thanks, television.) Foreign Correspondent might not be a great Hitchcock film, but it’s a good one. It has strong overtones of The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938): war clouds, episodic boy-meets-girl plot (Joel McCrea, Laraine Day), an unnamed foreign power, double agents, an endangered oldster. Herbert Marshall and George Sanders are the most distinguished of the players, the later as Scott ffolliott (the capital F was removed to honor of a beheaded ancestor). ffolliott gets the film’s best line: “Cancel my rumba lesson.” Foreign Correspondent also has something relatively unusual for a Hitchcock film: compelling special effects. This notebook though is not one of them.


[Click for a larger view. But you’ll have to watch to figure it out.]

Two things I thought about while watching the film the other night:

Once war breaks out, the film leaves the oldster Van Meer (Albert Basserman) behind. There’s no happy reunion, as there is with Mrs. Froy (Dame May Whitty) in The Lady Vanishes). Van Meer’s day — when war might have been averted — is past.

The tactics that the enemy uses, and which the film depicts as barbarous — bright light, loud music, sleep deprivation — were to become the stuff of American military interrogation.

Foreign Correspondent is available from the Criterion Collection, beautifully restored, with lots of extras.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station : The Woman in the Window

Domestic comedy

[While watching The Kennel Murder Case (1933). ]

“Did you see that dress she’s not wearing?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

“No One Was Like Vermeer”

My friend Stefan Hagemann alerted me to a song relevant to today’s post: Jonathan Richman’s “No One Was Like Vermeer.”

“Vermeer was eerie, Vermeer was strange. / He had a more modern color range”: I love it. Thanks, Stefan.

A guest-post by Stefan Hagemann
How to answer a professor

Tim’s not Vermeer

One’s abilities are also one’s limitations: to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Tim Jenison, the hero of Tim’s Vermeer (2013) is a technologist, the co-founder of a company that produces software for visual imaging. When Jenison looks at a Vermeer, he sees a special effect, a reproduction of the real: he even refers to Vermeer’s paintings as photographs and likens them to video images. This documentary, the work of Jenison’s friends Penn Jillette and Teller (the latter directed), tracks Jenison’s effort to crack the secret of Vermeer’s paintings (the use of optics) and recreate The Music Lesson by staging its scene and painting with the use of lenses and mirrors. Thus the film’s title.

But Tim’s not Vermeer (as he would readily acknowledge), and Tim’s painting is not a Vermeer. As seen on DVD, Tim’s not-Vermeer appears to be a doggedly literal and lifeless facsimile.¹ It seems likely that Vermeer’s paintings owe something to optics. But a painting is not merely a transcription, a reproduction of the real by mechanical means. Vermeer may be, as Jillette suggests, the greatest artist “of all time.” But why? Because his paintings look like photographs? The idea of art that runs through Tim’s Vermeer is sadly naïve.

I like what William Carlos Williams says in Spring and All (1923), a book of twenty-seven poems and a prose commentary on matters of imagination and representation:

The only realism in art is of the imagination. It is only thus that the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation.

Art is not a transcript, not a copy, Williams says, again and again, in a various ways. His prose has a curious relevance to optics-based art: reversing the instruction that Hamlet gives the Players — “to hold as ’twere, the mirror up to nature,” Williams insists that Shakespeare “holds no mirror up to nature” in his work. The power of imagination, rather, “is to give created forms reality.”

“Plagiarism after nature”: that’s what Jenison seems to think Vermeer is all about. What’s missing is a consideration of the artist’s imagination. The Music Lesson is, after all, a composition of Vermeer’s making, not something that he happened upon and transcribed. What elements went into the composition? What’s compelling about it? What might it suggest to a viewer whose interest in art goes beyond how-did-he-do-that?

What my relatively unlearned eye sees in The Music Lesson: an arrangement of planes, contrasts of light and dark, a variety of textures, a deeply quiet scene (despite the music-making) that has much to do with decorum and intimacy. The figures in the painting are alone and not alone: an artist’s easel is visible in the mirror. I am pretty sure that if I were to travel back in time to Delft, I would not see anything resembling this painting — except this painting.

An excellent site for learning more about Johannes Vermeer: Essential Vermeer. Here is that site’s page for The Music Lesson. For Vermeer and optics, start at this page: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura. And for a large version of The Music Lesson, try this one.

¹ In truth, a facsimile of a facsimile. Jenison received permission to view the painting (part of the Royal Collection of Great Britain), but he worked from reproductions.

Whitney, yecch

This exhibition will be the artist’s first major museum presentation in New York, and the first to fill nearly the entirety of the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building with a single artist’s work. It will also be the final exhibition to take place there before the Museum opens its new building in the Meatpacking District in 2015.

The Whitney Museum now hosts Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, a gesture that says much about art and money and fame. As the Museum explains, Koons has “transformed the relationship of artists to the cult of celebrity and the global market.” Well, yes — and what a sad farewell for the Whitney.

Getty Publications Virtual Library

The J. Paul Getty Museum makes its backlist publications available to read online or download as free PDFs: Getty Publications Virtual Library. That’s generosity.

My big catch: Judith Keller’s Walker Evans: Catalogue of the Collection (1995).

[In my mind, I’m still in California.]