Whitney biennial

First, I was seized by the Marsden Hartley portrait of Madawaska, Acadian Light-Heavy, Third Arrangement 1940. I could feel the brushtokes, white and black, and heavy around the eyes. Here the massive body stares at you. then you walk through the doors the Nick Mauss has constructed, with cotton appliqué and velvet, with brass doorknobs and doorstoppers, in a reconstruction of the antechamber of Guerlain's First Institute of Beauty in Paris, designed by Christian Berard in1939.
After the doors, some remarkable drawings by the remarkable Eyre de Lanux, one yelling at you: "Consuelo! she yelled "Consuelo! "and, lower, the words "I kneel to you" alongside a feminine torso. Very wow.

And a play on Poussin's Four Seasons, with four sorts of paintings referencing them, in creating new seasons. The raw brushstrokes "question bourgeois sensibility," as in the Poussin, says the wall text. They are, says Jutta Koether, "windows onto a window..."

Most amazing, Elaine Reichek's Paint me a Cavernous White Shore (from T.S. Eliot's "Sweeney Erect," says the citation.
This tapestry-looking object was made with a digital sewing machine, looking back to Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace's 19th century plan for an "Analytical Engine, " the precedessor of computer drawing. Etc.

Oh yes, more, but these I particularly took to...

Translating Pierre Reverdy

One of the happiest things in my very fortunate life is being able to translate French poetry, along with others. For years, I had the great luck of translating with Patricia Terry (now, alas, not with us), and we spent marvelous long moments over and over contemplating how best to render modern poets -- that is, from Mallarme on to the present.
Now, to my joy, Joe Phillips, which is to say, Black Widow Books, will be publishing the translations of Pierre Reverdy we did together -- and all of the Roof Slates Pat did and the Prose Poems I did and the introductions we wrote side by side. Very remarkable, working side by side with someone: my favorite thing.

And then I am preparing a selection of Reverdy poems also, with translations by several different hands -- what a subtle and grand poet he was!

ps to Equinox!

forgot to say, in case anyone is reading this, that in the play at 59 e 59th, things had to be abbreviated, so a picture of Roger Fry on the wall, in case someone wonders how he got elided as Vanessa's lover for years -- and he WAS, after all, ROGER FRY (big hero of mine) -- and of course George Mallory sort of stands in for David Garnett, because of whom Duncan went to bed with Vanessa (to make him jealous), thus Angelica later is marrying her father's lover, but that is all very too much to go into one
play, so never mind, but the wall pictures are nice, so is the mantelpiece, THAT is what feels authentic....

Bloomsbury and Two Farewells

Early morningish again... Went to play at 59 east 59 theatre, Eternal Equinox, by Joyce Hokin Sachs, produced by Grove Theater Center, very surprisingly authentic-feeling. Studio space at Charleston, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, with George Mallory coming in, before the second Everest climb. Picture of Charleston (rescued, ahem, by my cousin Debo Gage, who created the Charleston Trust in 1980 -- about whom Quentin Bell said to me: "your cousin breezed in and saved us" -- and of Vanessa and Duncan and Mallory also. Studio looked like the studio, pictures on wall looked like the ones we know, by Duncan and Vanessa, and Vanessa was played, I thought, to perfection. Very remarkable indeed, after the super productions recently of Mrs. Dalloway and, less recently, of Orlando done like a lyric poem. Would be nice to have a small Theatre Fund to send one's Ph.D. students to such delights...

On the other side of things, the destructive side, the green tent of Billy's Antiques that used to be pitched at East Houston in the Bowery has had its funeral procession. Songs, poems, mary: " And a dirge: "Don't Giggle at the Corpse." It was like a museum of madness, said an onlooker, and people cut out pieces of the green fabric for remembering -- itself reminiscent of the orange squares distributed during and after the Christo Gates here a few years ago. Yes, I have my orange square, and so does my daughter Hilary.

One more loss: The Monkey House from the gorgeous and much-revered Bronx Zoo, the last of the Beaux-Arts Animal House: I remember loving it, way before I knew what Beaux-Arts anything was, and before we started deploring the Colonial anything -- exhibitions, epochs. I grew up in what I suppose was sort of the Colonial South: what did I know? Little, probably, and probably also now. In any case, Charles Siebert has written an informed meditation on this, and animal displays, "Farewell to the Monkey House," in the New York Times of Sunday, March 11.

Must go to see the Francesca Woodman exhibit at the Guggenheim, and the (again!) Exquisite Corpse thing at MOMA... a while back, we had the Retour du Cadavre Exquis, at the drawing Center, with artists sending in their own Exquisite Corpses from all over, and, gloriously, it doesn't seem to be dying out, again. So maybe there was and is something freeing about this so delightfully collective game, starting with "les petits papers" on which you wrote something and passed it on, or drew, ditto. Nice when things don't die out.

So I've been writing things for art galleries and loving it: Surrealism and the New World, for the Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco, and now on Andre Masson and the Mythology of Desire for the BlainDiDonna gallery here, and next a Miro and his Poets... And I LOVED translating the very very untranslatable Gherasim Luca for Rainer Hanshe's new press, Contra Mundum...Next, an early Cendrars, why not?

everything at once

It somehow seems more exciting to me to do several things at once: nothing gets done as deeply perhaps as it might, were I to be solidly committed to one thing at a time, but there it is, and here am I, early morningish, translating a Rene Char passage on Goerges de la Tour for a poet-painter friend, doing an outline for an essay on Andre Breton and Rene Char for a new Princeton reader for the "general public," preparing (or not really) a talk for tomorrow night at Hollins University in Virginia,
and the catalogue essay for an Andre Masson exhibition -- and, oddly, each under or overtaking seems to nourish the others.
That's an early morning, optimistic view, I well know. And next week for my seminar on Letters and Lives, I have to think about WHAT exactly is so moving and so essential about Van Gogh's letters to Theo his brother -- yesterday we tackled, well, discussed, the letters of Proust and some of the various pieces and books written around him, like Richard Goodkin's more than thought-provoking Around Proust. It goes from Bergson and Mallarme to Wagner and film and everything else: I can't even pretend to read enough of anything, but perhaps a suggestion works as well as a whole massive entity. I surely hope so.
AND i was just invited to participate in the defense of another dissertation in Paris, where I really do love going, always staying in the same hotel if not with my beloved friends, always breakfasting in the same cafe, often dining in the same place -- all in a small radius. And this time, I will go to meet the wife of Gherasiim Luca, a Romanian surrealist poet whom I've been translating, thanks to Rainer Hanshe and his new publishing house. Before that, though, many other talks, including one on Gertrude Stein and literary cubism, whatever that turns out to be.

Leonardo....

Since, like thousands of others, I had hoped, going over to London for 2 days, to somehow wangle a ticket for the Leonardo
exhibition at the National Gallery, and hadn't done so, I went with my husband to Leonardo Live, at Cinema 2 on 3rd ave. We had read the articles on the two Virgin of the Rocks paintings, in both the London and the New York Review of Books,.
Wasn't taken by the lovely presenting woman -- so like my least favorite kind of female -- but ah, how intelligent was what Fiona Shaw had to say, about the just found painting of Christ: seductive to the soul , she said. And how intelligent is her face: I had missed her as an actress when she came to New York a little while back, and was glad not to miss her now.
It was funny and not unpleasant to see the Leonardo questionnaire projected on the shot of the National Gallery for about 20 minutes before the film started: some merriment in the audience at the questions, but actually quite nice, and certainly better than the ads usually projected before the film. Much less splashy than the Peter Greenaway version of the Last Supper at the Armory, which I liked less than his Veronese seen in Venice. Good to see so many enthusiasts standing in line outside, very much of all ages.

Constable's clouds

Having finished my work in the Beinecke library at Yale earlier than predicted, I sauntered over to Chapel Street -- past the gate where you enter to get to the Dwight Chapel, where I was married the first time -- and went to the British art gallery, as I always do when I have a moment in New Haven. This time, I just wanted to look at John Constable's cloud studies, on the second floor, and they fill your head with happiness, somehow. It is like seeing Martin Johnson Heade's paintings in the Met Museum in New York: things you go back to. And i am reading, with delight, Christopher Benfey's book on hummingbirds and Heade and Dickinson, which even contains a bit on Joseph Cornell and his great box about the Blue Peninsula and Dickinson...Those clouds. I remember one Constable cloud formation in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, that I also go back to visit. It has to be reached up those narrow stairs in the middle of some room, and it is worth it. Ages ago, I read Lucas on clouds, all because of these Constables, and the Theorie des nuages of the terrific French critic Hubert Damisch....More clouds, please.