reinventing inventing abstraction

So when my friend Aoibheann Sweeney and I decided to meet in the course of Inventing Abstraction at MOMA, it had seemed a truly great idea. As an idea, it was that. So what was it that, going through it, it seemed overly-familiar (yes, right, yes, that kind of thing), and unriveting???

I liked the way the Kupka exploded on the left wall just going in, and of course of course, they made and quite rightly too a big thing of the Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay Prose du Transsiberien long poem-thing (I have loved it for something like 200 years at least, as have we all,  most of we at least all).  And Blaise Cendrars, that superb chosen name, all about embers and burning,  thought "poem" was not what it was, and loved the medieval sense of the "prosa"). And the many gorgeous bookcovers by Sonia Delaunay  (what a great person, painter, dress fabric designer, oh, everything) she was indeed! I think in one of the many anthologies we did of women writers, some French ones, some not, some for Yale, some for Prentice-Hall, and so on, we used one of her designs, how not? And remember the Cooper-Hewitt Sonia Delaunay show a few years back???

 We agreed with the always brilliant Peter Schjedahl about the Sophie Tauber-Arp weaving (and i took to the triptych in its solemn grandeur).

Right, and of course, I was happy to see the Duncan Grant scroll -- and it seems you could hear a Bach Brandenburg if you hovered closely enough in the vicinity -- and that period, 1914, in his work, was so astounding (years ago, when I thought maybe I could make enough from some book or some lecture to acquire a Duncan Grant from that period, oh, funny it seems now, and this sentence is going nowhere slowly, so I will just put a period of  my own.)

And the dancers: I hadn't know that Mary Wigman had, or put on, such an Oriental face in her astounding sitting gyrations, and loved the Laban stuff, having heard so much about Laban notation...

and the great Peter Scheldahl writing in the New Yorker about this show: you have to agree about the Sophie Tauber-Arp weaving, and the triptych I also loved -- yes, but why do I not feel I have to rush back? Oh heavens, one less thing to rush back to, super idea.

Paris indeed

paris indeed

haven't been writing HERE because of living THERE, as in Paris, for a thesis defense, MUCH ENJOYED, on surrealist exhibitions in North America (and Mexico, some stress upon), from 1930, 31 --first, Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, directed by Chick Austin (whose daughter, Sally Austin, made Joseph Cornell-like boxes, and whose biography, brief, I was asked to write), and then Julien Levy, in New York, more famous, and where the excitement  continued. Dali's entrance into America sent the surrealism publicity into tailspin, AND made the movement more (perhaps alas) acceptable to the cultural atmosphere. Then the really big things, in 1940... 1960, around which this thesis -- interestingly written by Susan Power -- turns. I loved being on the jury, because you get flown over and hotelled for 3 days, AND you get to see the people you wanted to see anyway, AND you feel part of things. And lunch at La Palette, just munching outside... and Le Procope, which I like FAR LESS than the old standby on Monsieur-le-Prince, oh what's it's name, you know if you are reading this, POLIDOR,  no reservations, and then you can rush down the street to the cinema,
 and having breakfast at Le Rostand, across from the Luxembourg gardens, best croissants in Paris, and the hot milk in a little jug...
In fact, it was so grand just wandering around one's Paris streets (for me, only the 5th and the 6th arrondissements), and seeing Marilyn Hacker, great Translator of poetry, Monique Chefdor, world's authority on Eugene Guillevic, the Breton poet, and also Blaise Cendrars, and so on, including my favorite poet living in France, Yves Bonnefoy, and the wonderful art writer, Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat, and staying a bit -- ah, too short, with Marie-Claire Dumas, my French sister, because of her generosity from way back, she who knows everything about Robert Desnos, easily the greatest surrealist poet, to my mind. AND we went to see Pierrette Leveque, who is involved in the rue Blomet, and the idea of Blomet Paradiso, hope someday to have an exhibition about that -- am now writing on Miro and his poet friends...when I dislodge myself from Pierre Reverdy and all the translations of his greatest poems I am gathering....
ah, the joys of caring about poetry!
And now back in New York, how not to love being here? the park and the well everything...