September 26, 2011 Issue

Janet Malcolm’s "Depth of Field," in this week’s issue of the magazine, is unlike any “Annals of Art” piece I’ve ever read. Most “Annals of Art” stories are exercises in appreciation. The artists aren’t grilled; the writers aren’t angry (if they are, they don’t say so). But in “Depth of Field,” Malcolm pounces on something her subject, the photographer Thomas Struth, says in casual conversation over lunch, sharply questions him, and turns it into an object lesson in “journalistic opportunism.” She also admits to “rather crossly” leaving Struth at a photo-shoot that seemed to her to drag on too long. And she mocks Struth’s recent portrait of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, taken at Windsor Castle, saying, “My first impression was of a vaguely familiar elderly couple posing for formal portrait in a corner of the palatial Minneapolis hotel ballroom where there fiftieth wedding anniversary is being celebrated.” All of these moves, it seems to me, are against Malcolm’s interest to report. They put her in an unfavorable light, making her appear petty, crotchety, and negative. Yet, to her credit, she doesn’t repress them; she includes them. It’s her psychology coming out, and she lets it come out. As a result, her piece seems truer than most other art writings - the prose equivalent of a very precise photo shot through the filter of her own fine-tuned, deconstructionist sensibility. I found it riveting, especially the way she swings around to the opposite point of view, admitting she was wrong to be cross at Struth, showing Struth to be good natured, even finding the portrait of Elizabeth and Philip to be not so bad after all. She says, “Gradually the royal couple came into focus as such, and the photograph assumed its own identity as a work by Struth, the plethora of its details somehow tamed to serve a composition of satisfying serenity and readability.” The same could be said about “Depth of Field.” At first, after I’d finished reading it, I didn’t know what to make of it. I found it both irritating and elating. But gradually, like Struth’s picture of the royal couple, it came into focus and assumed its own identity as a work by Malcolm, an artful journalistic portrait of an artful photographic portraitist.

Credit: The above photograph is Thomas Struth's portrait of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh; it appears in the September 26, 2011 issue of The New Yorker as an illustration for Janet Malcolm's "Depth of Field."

"Beyond Words: Photography In The New Yorker"

Looking at the photos on display in the exhibition “Beyond Words: Photography in the New Yorker,” at the Howard Greenberg Gallery website (www.howardgreenberg.com), I found myself lingering over only two of them: Steve Pyke’s 2005 portrait of John Ashbery and Snowdon’s 1957 portrait of Iris Murdoch. Pyke’s photo was used to illustrate Larissa MacFarquhar’s wonderful profile of Ashbery (“Present Waking Life,” The New Yorker, November 7, 2005). It’s a fascinating photo. I remember seeing it when it appeared in the magazine. At first, I thought it was a bit flawed. Ashbery’s forehead and eyes reflect the white light of the camera flash, about ten percent of his face is outside the picture frame, and the right side of the photo is dominated by a large, incoherent expanse of black. In terms of composition, the photo is odd. But it’s also memorable, an extreme close-up of a face containing large eyes that look back at us as if they’re seeing our future. As I flicked through the exhibition’s pictures, I was looking for it. And I was delighted when I found it. I was looking for other favorites, too: Pyke’s shimmery black-and-white shot of Rem Koolhass (or is it his reflection?) that appears in the March 14, 2005, issue of The New Yorker, as an illustration for Daniel Zalewski’s “Intelligent Design”; Han Gissinger’s blurred action shot of kitchen reality at the Flamingo coffee shop (see Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men,” The New Yorker, September 5, 2005), Sylvia Plachy’s gritty, off-kilter picture of the up-raised right arm of a statue of Jesus (see Ian Frazier’s “Route 3,” The New Yorker, February 16 & 23, 2004), Robert Polidori’s semi-abstract scrap metal photo illustrating John Seabrook’s “American Scrap” (The New Yorker, January 14, 2008), Martin Schoeller’s gleaming shot of Don Ainsworth driving his “sapphire-drawn convexing elongate stainless mirror” (see John McPhee’s “A Fleet Of One,” The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2003), Josef Astor’s gorgeous rooftop beehive-keeper pic that illustrates Adam Gopnik’s “New York Local” (The New Yorker, September 3 & 10, 2007). I regret to report that none of them are in the show. But what is in the show, in addition to Pyke’s extraordinary Ashbery shot, is one of the most intensely literary photos I’ve ever seen. I’m referring to Snowdon’s 1957 black-and-white photo of Iris Murdoch, showing her seated at a table in front of an open book that’s propped up against a lamp, reading intently through a cloud of smoke billowing from the cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. There’s a pile of books on the table, and a fountain pen; behind her, there’s a bookcase full of books. Light pours in from a window on her right. The picture has a painterly look, almost as if it was a photo of an oil painting by a great portrait painter. I love this photograph. It was used to illustrate John Updike’s review of Peter J. Conradi’s Iris Murdoch: A Life (“Young Iris,” The New Yorker, October 1, 2001; included in Updike’s 2007 essay collection Due Considerations). In his review, Updike calls Murdoch “the pre-eminent English novelist of the second half of the twentieth century.” But, in 1957, when Snowdon took her picture, her career was just getting started. Snowdon somehow conjured a photograph that predicted her greatness.

Credit: The above photograph of Iris Murdoch is by Snowdon; it appears in the October 1, 2001 issue of The New Yorker as an illustration for John Updike's "Young Iris."

Interesting Emendations: John Updike's "Museums and Women"

What is the meaning of “unsearchability” in John Updike’s great short story “Museums and Women”? And why did he delete it from the version of the story that appears in his 2003 collection The Early Stories 1953 – 1975? In the original “Museums and Women,” published in The New Yorker, November 18, 1967, Updike wrote:

What we seek in museums is the opposite of what we seek in churches – the consoling sense of previous visitation. In museums, rather, we seek the untouched, the never-before-discovered; and it is their final unsearchability that leads us to hope, and return.

The same passage occurs in the version of the story included in Updike’s 1972 collection Museums and Women. But the version in The Early Stories is different. It reads as follows:

What we seek in museums is the opposite of what we seek in churches – the consoling sense of previous visitation. In museums, rather, we seek the unvisited, the never-before-discovered.

Note the deletion of “untouched” and “it is their final unsearchability that leads us to hope and return.”

The original story mentions “unsearchability” again in the following passage:

My woman, fully searched, and my museum, fully possessed; for this translucent interval – like the instant of translucence that shows in a wave between its peaking and its curling under – I had come to the limits of unsearchability. From this beautiful boundary I could imagine no retreat.

This passage is also found in the Museums and Women version of the story. However, in The Early Stories version, it’s changed to the following:

My woman, fully searched, and my museum, fully possessed; for this translucent interval – like the instant of translucence that shows in a wave between its peaking and its curling under – I had come to a limit. From this beautiful boundary I could imagine no retreat.

The words “the limits of unsearchability” are changed to simply “a limit.” What accounts for these changes? It could be that Updike reconsidered the logic of following “My woman fully searched” with “I had come to the limits of unsearchability.” You’d think that if the woman is fully searched, it would be the limits of searchability that’s arrived at, not unsearchability. But if it’s just a matter of tightening the logic, why change “untouched” to “unvisited”? And why delete “hope and return”? Why does Updike associate “hope and return” with “unsearchability,” but not with “the never-before-discovered”? I think what Updike is really talking about here is adultery. In The Early Stories, “Museums and Women” is included in the section titled “The Two Iseults.” Denis de Rougemont, in his classic Love in the Western World (1956), says, “There is one great European myth of adultery – the Romance of Tristan and Iseult.” Updike reviewed de Rougemont’s 1963 essay collection Love Declared (The New Yorker, August 24, 1963; included in Updike’s 1965 collection Assorted Prose), in the course of which he says:

Love as we experience it is love for the Unattainable Lady, the Iseult who is “ever a stranger, the very essence of what is strange in woman and of all that is eternally fugitive, vanishing, and almost hostile in a fellow-being, that which indeed incites to pursuit, and rouses in the heart of a man who has fallen prey to the myth an avidity for possession so much more delightful than possession itself. She is the woman-from-whom-one-is-parted; to possess her is to lose her.”

The quotation in the above passage is from Love in the Western World. Unattainable and unsearchable are similar states. Seeking the untouched, the unvisited is akin to pursuing “the woman-from-whom-one-is-parted,” the “never-before-discovered.” The “instant of translucence,” the “beautiful boundary” is analogous to that moment when the Unattainable Lady (the “untouched,” “unsearchable,” “unvisited” woman) rouses “in the heart of a man who has fallen prey to the myth an avidity for possession so much more delightful than possession itself.” Maybe my interpretation is too acute. But in support of it, I point out that, according to the Index of Titles at the back of The Early Stories, Updike wrote “Museums and Women” in 1962, around the time Love in the Western World was much on his mind. In the Foreword to Assorted Prose, Updike says, in respect of de Rougemont's analysis in Love in the Western World, “His overriding thesis seems increasingly beautiful and pertinent.” So why did Updike drop “unsearchability” from his final version of “Museums and Women”? I think it was to make his use of the Iseult legend a shade subtler.

September 19, 2011 Issue

Of the many different types of fact pieces that appear in The New Yorker, the ones I find most irresistible concern the nature of the creative process - how life is made into art. That’s why I found the tagline of Michael Schulman’s “King’s Speech” (“Katori Hall spins theatre from a moment in history”), in this week's issue, so alluring. I immediately followed it into the story and read blissfully, raptly, without stop, right to the end. What a wonderful piece! It’s about the sources of Hall’s play The Mountaintop. I like how Schulman begins, plunging directly into the historical facts out of which the play springs:

On April 3, 1968, as thunderstorms soaked the city of Memphis, Carrie Mae Golden asked her mother if she could go out. Golden was fifteen years old and lived in a three-bedroom house on Allen Street with nine siblings and two small children of her own. There were tornado warnings across western Tennessee that night, but they didn’t deter Golden, who desperately wanted to catch a ride to Mason Street, where Martin Luther King, Jr., was due to speak.

And I like Schulman’s selection of material and the way he’s woven it together. “King’s Speech” comprehends the sanitation workers’ strike, the Poor People’s Campaign, King’s assassination, an overview of Hall’s work, a visit with Hall at her home in Southaven, attending Sunday morning service at Brown Missionary Baptist Church, a drive through the Goldens’ old neighborhood in Memphis, a viewing of the Lorraine Motel, and attendance at a rehearsal of The Mountaintop in a studio near Times Square.

I also like Schulman’s selection of details, e.g., Hall’s hair is “a spaghetti plate of dreadlocks,” the parking lot at Brown Missionary Baptist Church is so big that “we had to take a golf cart from our parking spot,” Hall’s comment, “All this history, just floatin’ away,” as she drives by some of Memphis’s numerous weed-covered lots.

Most of all, I like Schulman’s subject, a spirited playwright who has endeavored to enter into a great man’s mind, heart, and skin for the purpose of “humanizing him.” “King’s Speech” is a memorable piece. I enjoyed it enormously.

September 12, 2011 Issue

Of the dozen Talk stories in this week’s 9/11-commemoration issue, the one I like most is Ian Frazier’s "Passengers." It’s about a bus driver, Salvatore Siano, known as Sal. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Sal was driving his bus into New York City. As he approached the city on Route 3,

he saw the smoke rising from downtown. By the time he reached the tunnel, it had been closed, and Sal had received a call from another driver telling him about the first plane. Wedged in heavy traffic, Sal managed to back the bus onto an entrance ramp, turn around, and retrace his route, dropping the passengers at their stops and returning their tickets or cash fares along the way.

Before this incident, Sal was known for his colorful, outgoing personality. As Frazier says,

When he drove, Sal reconfigured his bus as his living room, lining the dashboard with toy ducks, chatting over his shoulder with passengers, and sometimes keeping snowballs handy to throw at policemen through the open door. He used to caution children, “I am not a role model!” His travel-guide monologues upon arrival at the Port Authority Bus Terminal – “Welcome to sunny Aruba! Don’t forget your sunblock! Cha-cha-cha!” – won him minor fame.

For a while after September 11, Sal “stopped joking around on the bus.” Frazier says, “When asked why, he grew sad and dispirited, and said that he was too emotionally caught up in the tragedy. Eventually, he began to joke again.”

Frazier has written about Sal before. In his great “Route 3” (The New Yorker, February 16 & 23, 2004; included in Frazier’s terrific 2005 collection Gone To New York), he describes him as follows:

Sal is short and has a boyish (though graying) shock of hair. His movements are more antic than usual for a bus driver. Sal is the only bus driver I know of who seems to notice what’s along the road. When he sees something that interests him, he takes up the microphone and announces it to the passengers. Colorful Halloween displays, Christmas lights, a yard full of yellow and purple crocuses, the Goodyear blimp over Giants stadium – all rate an excited mention by Sal, followed by his usual exclamations: “Oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy!”

In “Route 3,” Frazier talks about September 11’s impact on Sal:

For a while after September 11, Sal quit doing his antic announcements. His bus pulled into the station in silence, with the passengers waiting to expectantly but in vain. The loss of Sal’s announcements, minor as it was, saddened me out of proportion. Without some silliness, what is life for? Later, though, to general relief, Sal went back to giving what he calls his “spiels.”

In “Passengers,” Frazier visits Sal at his apartment in Clifton. Sal is now retired. He talks to Frazier about 9/11. He says:

“The other day, I was remembering this one passenger from Upper Montclair who always got on at the Norwood Avenue stop, by the public library. After the attacks, I read in the paper – someone must have told me his name – that this man had passed away. He was such a pleasant human being. A man about my height, wore glasses. I had seen him just the week before. The obituary in the Times said this man volunteered to work in homeless shelters, and sometimes slept in them to experience what they were like.” (Here Sal began to cry.) [I confess, I felt emotion starting to well up inside me, too.] “When I read that, I knew that my instincts about him had been right. I remember him whenever I go by Norwood and the library.”

Most writers would’ve been content to end their story on that note. But Frazier isn't "most writers." He shifts his focus to the passenger, and says:

The passenger’s name was Howard L. Kestenbaum. Along with the names of nearly three thousand other people who died that day, his is inscribed on a granite wall at the edge of the memorial garden in Eagle Rock Reservation, a county park in nearby West Orange, at the top of a ridge with a clear view of Lower Manhattan. “He had a wife and daughter, and they are special people, too,” Sal continued. “I still see them around Montclair on a regular basis. When ever I do, I embrace them and give them a kiss on the cheek.”

“Passengers” is a marvelous piece – a touching tribute to Siano and Kestenbaum, and a wonderful companion to Frazier’s brilliant “Route 3.”

September 5, 2011 Issue

From the moment I saw the online table of contents of this week’s issue, I’ve been anticipating the magazine’s arrival in the mail. Now it’s finally here. Of course, I want to immediately turn to Ian Frazier’s “The March of the Strandbeests” and devour it. In preparation, I’ve already viewed and re-viewed the Photo Booth slideshow of Lena Herzog’s ravishing black-and-white Strandbeest photographs. But, I decide to delay the pleasure of my reading of Frazier’s piece, and go first to Rebecca Mead’s “Better, Faster, Stronger,” a profile of “Silicon Valley’s self-help guru," Timothy Ferriss. First sentence of the third paragraph, my interest in the piece catches fire. Mead writes:

I didn’t know anyone, so I went out of my comfort zone to talk to a young man named Courtney Reum, who told me that he had left a job at Goldman Sachs to start a company that makes and sells Veev – an organic, kosher, gluten-free, carbon-neutral açai liquor, bottled in recycled glass, with labels printed in soy ink.

Great sentence! The combination of all those interesting, piquant words - organic, kosher, gluten-free, carbon-neutral, açai liquor, recycled glass, soy ink – is exquisite. And I like the way Mead picks up on Ferriss’s use of the self-help jargon term “comfort zone” in the previous paragraph and weaves it into the above-quoted line. Ferriss is a colorful character in a New-Age-Silicon Valley-self-help sort of way (e.g., weighing his feces, sumo wrestling, tagging tiger sharks, inducing 15-minute orgasms in female bedmates). I laughed when I read his “clenched vagina” line. Mead writes some humorous lines of her own (e.g., her reaction to Ferriss’s speaking Japanese and Mandarin: “although to see him doing so brings irresistibly to mind Mike Myers speaking Cantonese in ‘Wayne’s World’”). And do I detect a glint of a good journalist’s healthy skepticism running through the piece? I think so, and I’m pleased to see it. For example, at the end of a sentence telling us about Ferriss’s plan to offer investment advice via Facebook and Twitter, she archly says, “assuming that sufficient numbers of people will opt for the appeal of digital connectivity over the allure of recreational shark-tagging, competitive tango dancing, or any of the other activities that one might pursue in the hundred and sixty-four hours of free time in a four-hour workweek.” I enjoyed “Better, Faster, Stronger” immensely. Its prose enacts the fizzy, kinetic world it describes.

And now I turn to a completely different world where giant beasts made of plastic tubing stalk the beach near Delft. Ian Frazier’s “The March of the Strandbeests” is brilliant - where brilliant means vivid, precise, rich, poetic. It contains a number of inspired passages, e.g.:

The northeast wind skimmed the waves along the beach like pinwheel blades, the giant wind turbine above the harbor rotated, the para-surfers’ chutes twisted this way and that, the ropes on the masts of the catamaran in drydock beside the dunes snaked back and forth and banged their metal parts on the hollow aluminum with a racket that could frighten off wicked spirits. In shoreline indentations, heaps of sea foam accumulated and shivered, and clumps of foam kept blowing free and spinning across the sand, assuming corkscrew shapes and in the next instant abrading themselves away.

A terrific aspect of Frazier’s approach to writing is his inclusion of incidentals, i.e., experiences that most journalists would consider too marginal to be included in their stories. But, for Frazier (and for me, as reader), the incidental experiences are often the ones that make the story. For example, in “The March of the Strandbeests,” he mentions that Theo Jansen, the ingenious creator of the Strandbeests, had trouble finding his car in the airport parking garage. Frazier says:

At first, he couldn’t find his white Volvo in the airport parking garage, and I set down my suitcase while he listened for the dog. Theo has a small, wool-colored dog of a French Madagascar breed who goes almost everywhere with him and is named Murphy. In a minute, he picked up Murphy’s bark and we homed in on it. The dog barked more encouragingly the closer we got to the car.

“The March of the Strandbeests” abounds with such succulent details. Here’s another one:

In a vitrine, a leather-bound sketchbook of Gerard ter Borch the younger lay open to a black-chalk drawing of a tangled patch of a brush on a hillside. Such a no-count, lovely piece of ground!

That “Such a no-count, lovely piece of ground!” is great! It’s so typical of Frazier to notice and appreciate such a “no-count, lovely” detail.

My favorite passage of “The March of the Strandbeests” comes at the end. Frazier is describing one of the smaller Strandbeests, Animus Longer. He says, “From a distance, it looked like one of those folding pole-and-clothesline contraptions you hang laundry on.” Then he concludes the piece as follows:

This Strandbeest stood there for awhile, unnoticed. The shiny, wet sand held its reflection. Some new customers arrived and sat at one of the restaurant’s outdoor tables. A minute later, a stronger gust came up, and the apparent clothes drying rack suddenly went tiptoeing across the sand. The people at the table did a triple take and began pointing and laughing, and talking in Dutch. “Dat ding is aan het lopen!” (“That thing is walking!”) they cried.

What a delightful ending! I laughed when I read it.

Before concluding, I want to briefly comment on one more piece in this week’s issue, namely, James Wood’s “Cabin Fever,” a review of Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams. It’s one of the best pieces Wood has written for the magazine. I’m a fan of Wood’s writing. But I confess I’ve harbored a suspicion that he doesn’t really get (or like) American fiction. “Cabin Fever” dispels that suspicion forever. Wood says of Johnson’s writing in Train Dreams, “The hard, declarative sentences keep their powder dry for pages at a time, and then suddenly flare into lyricism.” “Cabin Fever” shows a deep appreciation for “the exactitude of Johnson’s language.” It’s filled with inspired quotations from Johnson’s work. The second-to-last paragraph, which begins, “The protagonist of ‘Train Dreams’ is not privy to stoned visions, but he is a steady noticer of the natural world, and the novella’s prose follows his eye with frequent exhalations of beauty,” is gorgeous.

Thank you New Yorker for these three excellent pieces. They’re a tremendous source of reading pleasure.

Postscript: Is Louis Menand changing his tune regarding the old New Yorker’s anticommercialism? He says, in “Browbeaten,” in this week’s issue, that Dwight Macdonald “believed completely in the official dogma of Ross and Shawn’s New Yorker, which was the absolute separation of the magazine’s business side (the side concerned with advertising and circulation) from the editorial side.” He says, “The New Yorker did not cater to any class of reader, in its self-accounting; it simply published what its writers and editors wanted to publish. It was blind to the marketplace.” That “official dogma” and “self-accounting” are interesting. Is Menand implying the reality was otherwise? There was a time – 1990, to be exact – when Menand believed in The New Yorker’s anticommercial nature. In “A Friend Writes: The Old New Yorker (The New Republic, February 26, 1990; included in his 2002 essay collection American Studies), he says:

In 1985, soon after the New Yorker was sold, Shawn wrote a “Notes and Comment” piece designed to defend the magazine’s editorial position against possible encroachments by the new ownership, and to reassure the magazine’s readers. “We, the editorial people,” he explained, “knew by instinct that to be able to make the New Yorker the magazine we wanted it to be we had to separate ourselves from the business side of the venture…. In this atmosphere of freedom, we have never published anything in order to sell magazines, to cause a sensation, to be controversial, to be popular or fashionable, to be ‘successful.’" The analysis is entirely correct, and it explains the true commercial genius of the New Yorker.

Now, it would appear, according to Menand’s latest take, that Shawn’s view, far from being “entirely correct,” was just “official dogma,” a “self-accounting.” This is unfair to Shawn and to the magazine. I believe Menand had it right the first time around. Shawn was true to his principles. The New Yorker's separation of art from commerce was real, and not mere window dressing, as Menand now seems to suggest.

George Ault's "Russell's Corners" Paintings

I want to post my response to Sanford Schwartz’s wonderful review of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibition “To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America" (“The Drama of the World at Night,” The New York Review of Books, August 18, 2011). But in order to do so I’m going to have stretch the jurisdictional boundaries of my blog because the connection between Ault and The New Yorker is, shockingly, almost non-existent. As far as I can determine, in the magazine’s entire history, Ault is mentioned just twice. Robert Coates, in a review of an exhibition at the Whitney Museum called “The Precisionist View in American Art” (“Camera Eye,” The New Yorker, February 4, 1961), writes:

Though the better-known figures constitute the main body of the collection, they by no means take up the whole of it, and one of the great values of the affair is the number of less well-known or now overlooked artists who have been sought out for inclusion. I’d cite especially such pieces as Elsie Driggs’ fine “Pittsburgh,” with its smoky-gray cluster of roofs and chimneys; the George Ault “From Brooklyn Heights,” a harbor view, and his “Sullivan Street Abstraction;” and, almost in toto, the small group of abstractions by Morton Schamberg, but most particularly his “Still Life, Camera Flashlight” and “Machine.”

And, in a follow-up to his piece on the Whitney show (“Backward, O Time,” The New Yorker, February 18, 1961), Coates says:

In the face of all this it was a pleasure, at the Whitney, to see revived such once familiar but now lost-in-limbo figures as Charles Demuth, George Ault, Niles Spencer, and Joseph Stella.

That’s it - that’s the full extent of The New Yorker’s notice of George Ault. On the other hand, Sanford Schwartz has been a long-time admirer of Ault’s work. In 1989, he wrote a piece about him called “Summer Nights at Russell’s Corners.” It’s included in his great 1990 essay collection Artists and Writers, which is where I first read it. I loved it, still do. “Summer Nights at Russell’s Corners” introduced me to Ault’s four great nighttime Russell’s Corners paintings: Black Night at Russell’s Corners (1943), Night at Russell’s Corners (1946), Bright Light at Russell’s Corners (1946), August Night at Russell’s Corners (1948). Schwartz included two reproductions, Bright Light at Russell’s Corners and August Night at Russell’s Corners, in his book. Even though they’re in black-and-white, they clearly show the thin lines of light on the power lines that are, as Schwartz points out, an aspect of Ault’s “great theme – a piercing, seemingly sourceless light.” Schwartz says, “He gives us the light that’s reflected on telephone or power lines at night – light that resembles strands of a necklace.” Schwartz’s “Summer Nights at Russell’s Corners” ends memorably:

Ault fine-tunes your eyes. He makes you aware of delicate light effects that happen, as it were, behind your back. When you drive down a country road at night and see, from the lights of a distant oncoming car, telephone wires turning into thin white lines, you may say to yourself, “An Ault!”

Schwartz’s new Ault piece, titled “The Drama of the World at Night,” is a beauty. It evinces the same deep appreciation for the way Ault depicts light that Schwartz’s earlier piece showed. Schwartz describes Ault as an “artist whose feeling for light is unlike anybody else’s.” Again, he draws our attention to the thin gleams of reflected light in the Russell’s Corners pictures. He says:

In his most mysterious and extraordinary works – four canvases of Russell’s Corners, a crossroads with some barns and a single hanging light in Woodstock – Ault does justice to that moment we have all experienced at night (and surprisingly few artists have shown) when overhead power lines, reflecting light from somewhere, become what might be called sky drawings.

But, in “The Drama of the World at Night,” Schwartz’s focus is not so much on Ault’s representation of light as it is on his representation of darkness. He says, “His [Ault’s] richest theme is the world at night.” In a superb passage of descriptive analysis, he says:

Made between 1943 and 1948 – and all, thankfully, in the Smithsonian’s exhibition – the Russell’s Corners paintings present a black nighttime setting, with no one around, touched here and there with areas of red and white (for the barns and light). Each painting shows the Corners from a different vantage point, and as Ault returned to the theme over the years, he eliminated more of the details, so that the last painting is primarily black. Yet no one picture feels finer or deeper than the others. They are in part about darkness but they aren’t emotionally “dark.” They express, rather, the wonder of there being this shifting drama of piercing light and enveloping obscurity happening in the middle of nowhere, without anyone’s having quite planned it. If he made no other works Ault would still be a remarkable figure.

That “they express, rather, the wonder of there being this shifting drama of piercing light and enveloping obscurity happening in the middle of nowhere, without anyone’s having quite planned it” is brilliant! It gets at why I find these Russell’s Corners paintings so affecting. Russell’s Corners is for most of us the type of nondescript intersection we barely register as we zoom by on our way to somewhere else. Ault saw it differently. Reading Schwartz’s stimulating pieces, looking at the Russell’s Corners pictures (there’s an excellent slideshow of Ault’s work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s website), I’m reminded of something John Updike said in the Foreword to his The Early Stories 1953-1975: “My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me – and to give the mundane its beautiful due.” That’s exactly what George Ault did in his marvelous Russell’s Corners paintings; he gave the mundane its beautiful due.

Credit: The above artwork is George Ault's Bright Light at Russell's Corners (1946); it appears in The New York Review of Books (August 18, 2011) as an illustration for Sanford Schwartz's "The Drama of the World at Night."