Drab by Choice

Picasso Black and White at the Guggenheim Museum 

            Pablo Picasso once said, “Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?  Can one really explain this?  No.  Just as one can never learn to paint.”  Picasso seemed to have an excellent and mutually beneficial relationship with color.  Most of his greatest pieces were bright and eye-catching.  His periods as an artist are even denoted by the color he used most prominently.  So why then does the Guggenheim Museum insist, in all its descriptions of its new exhibition, Picasso Black and White (running through January 23^rd), that Picasso was a minimalist of color, believing that it sullied great art?  Picasso was certainly not thrifty with color in Weeping Woman, or Crucifixion, or Girl Before a Mirror.  But in the exhibition, the Guggenheim puts on display only the Picasso pieces which are more void of color, and, consequentially, of life.

            It isn’t that the works are bad; quite the contrary.  Picasso, while not a very good realist, was a brilliant surrealist, especially later in life, and his art is without doubt beautiful.  It’s that most of the compositions shown are actually sketches, preparations for later pieces to be done all in color.  The museum was working around the fact that Picasso didn’t avoid color at all, but in fact worked toward it and reveled in it.  Even the simpler Cubist works at least had shades of brown and blue.  Though the title of the exhibition tries to prepare you for it, it can seem that the Guggenheim is presenting us with a barrage of black and white so intense that, by its end, you ache for Three Musicians.

            The art didn’t need saving, the exhibit did.  But the only thing that could have swooped in and snatched Black and White from the depths of the despair it seems to be writhing in would have been Picasso’s magnum opus, Guernica.  An outcry against the bombing of a Basque village of the same name, Guernica is the explosion of the brooding anger and intensity that fueled all those black and white paintings in the first place.  It is the culmination, in its outburst, of everything Picasso was working towards.  Sadly, the original Guernica is immovable from the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the tapestry version (commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller in 1955 when Picasso refused to sell him the original) is on loan indefinitely to the San Antonio Museum of Art.  As a result it seems that Black and White has no real conclusion, nowhere to go.  The winding hall of the Guggenheim ends, underwhelmingly, at one of the paintings Picasso entitled The Kiss, a series in which two androgynous lovers appear to be trying to eat each other.

            The most likeable parts of the exhibition were those in which Picasso’s style had fully developed, when he had begun to use shadow and depth, and when he had abandoned entirely the idea of verisimilitude in his art in favor of the near-abstract.  This is the Picasso we all know and love, monochromatic or not, and it is a relief to see it among so many sketches and plans for pieces that either never planned out or did in a way much more interesting than what the Guggenheim currently has to offer.  The exhibition has no centerpiece, no real underlying idea but for two colors which can be found in almost any painting you care to name, and no true direction to take Black and White.  The one thing we can take comfort in is that, like any misguided adaptation of the works of a genius (this season’s The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess being a prime example), the original idea of the artist remains the same.  Here we must appreciate what we can of Picasso, while attempting to ignore the out-of-the-ordinarily mediocre curating of the Guggenheim.

New Faces Behind the Glass

Renovations for the Hall of North American Mammals and the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall at the Museum of Natural History

            For seventy years, the dioramas in the Hall of North American Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History have greeted visitors warmly with a view onto a moment in nature they would most likely otherwise never see.  They’ve served the museum through wars, national shakeups, and international struggle.  So it’s understandable that they might need a once-over.

            In the past year, they’ve gotten one.  The wing of the museum that includes that Hall has been fully renovated.  Animals have had their fur brushed, their ears made more translucent, and their eyes re-glistened.  The backgrounds of their enclosures have been repainted, and the lights that illuminate them but have lately caused them to fade have been readjusted.  In addition, AMNH has added a memorial hall for its most famous advocate, President Theodore Roosevelt, whose father chartered the museum.  The Roosevelt section is brief but in-depth, composed of four displays added to the existing dioramas in the entry hall (spanning Roosevelt’s six decades of life as an aspiring naturalist, politician, and philanthropist) and a bronze statue of Teddy sitting serenely on a center bench.

            The Hall of North American Mammals is a far more impressive feat.  A year of preparation has led to the reopening of the hall with new donations and reinvigorated dioramas.  It is difficult, surveying the work taxidermists toiled over for so long, to remember a time when they looked any different, but they did.  A mere twelve months ago the animals of our forests, deserts, and mountains appeared weary, elderly, and approaching their final years (as before and after photos can attest).  It’s thanks to the efforts of the talented team at the museum that we can enjoy the naturalistic dioramas as they are today.  The Natural History Museum never backs down from a challenge, and the Hall is no exception.  It remains as memorable and identifiable as it ever has been, with the added benefit of revitalized animals to teach, exhibit and excite.

            This Hall, along with the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, is a landmark of the museum, one that is identified with the institution as strongly as the greening statue of Roosevelt straddling his horse on the museum’s steps.  Both the Hall of Mammals and the Milstein Hall are dark and quiet, mammoth and labyrinthine without appearing to be, and boast a world-famous attraction that greets viewers right as they enter the hall—for the Milstein Hall, the massive, benevolent whale that casts a shadow over the entrance, for the Hall of Mammals, the lone bear standing on its hind legs, perfectly shadowed as if on a stage.  In some ways, the hall is like a quiet theater where one can observe flashes of stories from all walks of the animal kingdom.  For this drama we owe thanks to the taxidermists and artists who made the hall possible.

            For in a more specific way, the Hall of North American Mammals is a different kind of art.  A representative for the museum in a behind-the-scenes video about the renovation calls it “animal sculpture.”  The museum’s artists have created something here on the scale of Rodin, a monument for the ages dedicated to the human acquisition of knowledge.  It may be less blatantly artistic and a little more icky, but the preservation of animal specimens is as important to the scientific community as making sure live animals stay that way.  I applaud this renovation and hope there will be many more to come in the museum and the hall’s lifespan.

Tested Faith

Grace at the Cort Theatre

            In promotional images for Grace, Paul Rudd, Michael Shannon, Kate Arrington and Ed Asner stare serenely out into space, faces and dispositions flawless, with no visible problems or bones to pick.  This image could not be further from the hour-and-a-quarter of mayhem and excitement that the four create on the Cort Theatre’s stage (and will through January 6^th).

            For one, in the images Ed Asner is clean-shaven, but in the play flaunts his Kris Kringle beard as a German exterminator named Karl, who, being German, naturally has horrible and completely relevant stories to tell about the Nazis.  He sprays pesticides all over the stage and uses catchphrases unsparingly.  His German accent is understandably rather lacking, and he looks (just as understandably) ridiculous in Bermuda shorts.  Nonetheless, as always, Asner’s performance is brilliant and entertaining.  No one, I presume, is surprised.

            The absolutely fantastic Michael Shannon (who saves the first half of the play) is prominently featured on the playbill smiling out at nothing with his smooth, even face gently lit.  On stage, he plays Sam Gavin, a NASA scientist who escaped a car crash that killed his fiancé and ripped off half of his face.  He wears a face mask reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter’s that, when removed, reveals an underwhelming and minor series of welts across his energetic mug.  Still, he seems rather depressed with his looks and his life, and Shannon conveys this with an air of genius.  In his first scene, he argues with an Apple tech support representative on the phone as if delivering an angry monologue by Shakespeare.

            Paul Rudd nearly hides Kate Arrington’s face on the Grace posters, which is an excellent metaphor for their characters’ tumultuous relationship.  Rudd plays Steve, an earnest evangelist and entrepreneur struggling to open a chain of gospel-themed hotels in sunny Florida.  As it becomes increasingly clear that he’s being duped by his investors and losing control of his wife, Sara (played by Arrington), Steve begins to lose his mind and his faith.  Sara, meanwhile, is drifting away toward Sam.  Rudd, a better stage actor than one might expect, portrays what Karl calls a “Jesus freak” convincingly and with an aura of darkness.  Arrington plays Sara as an unanchored wannabe Anna Karenina with no place to settle and nowhere to find home.  They are magical to watch.

            Grace is one of the few pieces of theater I’ve seen in which the actors save the script and not the other way round.  The book is mediocre, the story meandering, and plot points sparse.  Some ideas are even stolen, like portions of the narrative—including (spoiler alert) gunfire—playing forwards and then in reverse (exactly as in Christopher Nolan’s masterful thriller Memento).  Rudd, Shannon, Arrington, and Asner make it work.  Each is a star in his or her own right, and their actions all eventually factor in to the show’s sudden, dramatic finale.  It’s different from some other small ensemble shows in which actors work together like clockwork.  Here it’s more like four separate but perfectly synchronized clocks—and like clocks, the tension they create with the dexterity of seasoned professionals ticks on and on and on, up to an eventual explosion.

            There are many elements of Grace that make it worth seeing.  The staging (by Beowulf Boritt) is unique and fits perfectly to the show’s setting—two identical and neighboring condos that occasionally bleed together over space.  The direction (by Dexter Bullard) is adept and fast-paced, with touches of the mystical and the bizarre.  But the reason to see this show (and, let’s be honest, the only real reason most go to the theater) is the acting.  Few performances this season have impressed me more.