When you have ideas where your ears should be, you can be such a self-righteous moron. My Tchaikovsky problem is a case in point. I wasted years not listening to his music. What I thought closed my ears to what I might hear.
When I was a boy, longer ago than even your parents can remember, the music of Tchaikovsky was easy to love — all those sweeping tunes and swelling fiddles. His music was, in that antediluvian age, pretty well ubiquitous. Concert halls played his symphonies, pianists conquered the Soviet Union playing his piano concerto, and supermarkets offered LP specials for 49 cents with grocery purchases. And that is where I was first exposed to the Nutcracker Suite, played by an anonymous orchestra and conductor (Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite was on the “B” side).
My parents bought successive volumes from the supermarket and I became exposed to “The World’s Greatest Music,” including Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Brahms Second, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and all of those now-familiar war horses a friend of mine used to call “The Loud Classics.”
A few years on, as puberty hit, it was music like Tchaikovsky’s that spoke to me, with its pile-driven emotional excess and immediacy. My insides swelled with powerful feelings. That sort of “heart-on-sleeve” thrum speaks to those newly activated hormones.
But then, unfortunately, I became smarter, learned more, read what critics had written. I discovered that such music was trivial, shallow, showy and unserious and learned how wrong I had been. My taste turned to Beethoven’s late quartets and Bach’s unaccompanied violin works. That was serious music.
This is something that happens to many of us when we are becoming adults and presume to take on more grown-up tastes, pretending to understand more than we actually can. Ideas about the music supersedes what we actually hear.
And so, for the next 40 years or so, I disdained listening to much Tchaikovsky. Occasionally I would spin the Pathetique on the record player. It, after all, had a second movement in 5/4 time. Like Dave Brubeck.
Looking back, I realize that the musical culture was traveling much the same route as I was taking. Music that had been pilloried for being too “modern” and “dissonant” became more mainstream. One could hear Bartok or Stravinsky in the concert halls, played alongside Beethoven and Sibelius. And musicians and conductors, grown up in the same era as I did, shared much of my taste. Tchaikovsky slowly became out of fashion. Astringent drowned out lush.
It was still played, of course, but less frequently, and by orchestras and conductors more simpatico with Modernist esthetics than the tired old Romanticism. Stravinsky had stated, in no uncertain terms “Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.” And Toscanini has said Beethoven’s Eroica was not about heroism, but about “E-flat.” (Neither man actually believed their own words, and their music and music-making prove that, but their words proved highly influential).
Toscanini also said, “Tradition is only the last bad performance.” But tradition is the very heart of any classical music — music handed down from one generation of masters to a younger generation. Whether it is Indian classical music, Japanese Noh flute playing, or Pablo Casals teaching Bernard Greenhouse (of the Beaux Arts Trio) and Greenhouse teaching Paul Katz, onetime cellist of the Cleveland Quartet) it is tradition that defines it.
Orchestras and conductors who had learned their art before the 20th century and continued the traditions up through, perhaps 1970 or so, had the music in their old bones, understood how it was meant to go, and how the musical arguments played out in the notes. But the older musicians died out and the younger generation taking charge had a more “objective” view of the music. A tradition was dying.
You can hear this by comparing any Tchaikovsky symphony recorded by Eugene Ormandy (1899-1985) or Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988) with the same performed by Andris Nelsons (b. 1978) or Vladimir Jurowski (b. 1972). The younger players play the notes clearly and cleanly, even with excellent musicianship, but notes and music are different things. The younger generation grew up with Stravinsky or Prokofiev and had no problem with their complex scores. It was a shift in sensibilities. Younger musicians can breeze through Le Sacre du Printemps perfectly, while many old recordings show esteemed conductors fumbling through, missing accents and here and there. It’s a new tradition. (And I’m not even talking about “historically informed performance practice.”)
But in the 19th century music, the older conductors knew much the younger generation had no grasp of. They knew how the music “went.” What it was saying.
The true divide between the old and new were the World Wars and millions of dead. And especially after the genocide of the Second World War, it was no longer possible to believe in such old ideas as nobility or heroism. And music about such things no longer rang true. Listen to the version of Franz Liszt’s Les Preludes performed by Kurt Masur and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, from 1978 and you hear all the notes, and certainly there is excitement. But listen then to the 1929 performance by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and Willem Mengelberg, and you hear music that believes what it is saying. There is an earnestness to it, a fervor, that feels second-hand in the Masur recording. The difference between a hero and an actor playing a hero.
And so, I and the generations that grew up with me and after me no longer had the stomach to hear such “universal” emotions as Tchaikovsky tried to evoke in his music. Nothing universal could be trusted anymore, and the grand statements of fate and tradition were dumped.
I remember when teaching, a student pushed back on something I had said. “It’s all relative,” she said. “Nothing is true. It is your truth or my truth, but nothing is universally true.” It was a common belief for her generation. And given the “truths” espoused by various institutions that were shown to be mere self-serving hypocrisy after Watergate, after “I did not have sex with that woman,” and most of all, after Auschwitz, it was hard to fault her.
But I replied: “There is one truth that is universal. You will die. I will die. All living things will die.” That, I said, is the starting point for all art. After that, we look for anything else that we may make art from. Second truth follows from the first: The people you love will die, and many of those will die before you and you will suffer loss. How do you react to that loss? Yes, some Victorian pieties seem like sentimental claptrap to us now, but the impulse behind them is very real, and we can react to that reality.
And so, when I hear Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique, I feel deeply in my psyche the sense of death and loss inherent in the harmonies and melodies, and I am moved. Deeply moved. If the stylistic idiosyncrasies of his age are not ours, the underlying emotions are.
It is incumbent upon us, as listeners (and readers, and theater audiences) not to be deaf to the content of art. Yes, some music is meant only as divertissement, as Mozart serenades or Schubert ländler, but the more ambitious pieces — symphonies, operas, even ballets — are responses to the larger questions. Not only death or loss, but the subsequent propositions built from those original two: What is happiness, what is narrative, what is rhythm and physical movement and how does it all reflect the experience of being alive?
If you listen to Tchaikovsky’s music with ears instead of ideas, you hear not only emotions both bright and dark, but extraordinary melody and harmony, often rather advanced for its time, and unparalleled brilliance of orchestration.
Even so minor a piece as his Nutcracker ballet is built from absolute crystal gems of sound combinations. Pure genius.
The disdain so many now feel for the music of Tchaikovsky, or, for that matter, Rachmaninoff, or others of their era, is, as far as I am concerned, unearned, and merely an expression of ignorance. One should never cut oneself off from such delight, pleasure, and the emotions evoked. One should never close off one’s ears to music, or let ideas about the music take charge.
On September 27 the remnants of Hurricane Helene turned Asheville, N.C., into a post-apocalyptic landscape. Fallen trees blocked streets and roads were turned into creek beds. Power lines were downed everywhere and the two rivers of the region carried whole houses downstream. Bridges are gone. City water lines destroyed. The buildings that remain in the lower areas of Buncombe County are larded with a foot-deep layer of toxic mud. People died.
It has been a month since the storm and there are still many roads closed, homes without power, and the city water is unfit to drink. We have to boil it even to wash dishes. And what comes out of the tap is a cloudy, rust-colored fluid.
It has been so bad, left so many people stranded or homeless, that Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen has come to feed those in need.
At our house, we were otherwise lucky. Our neighborhood had fewer fallen trees than others and we were high enough in elevation that we avoided the flooding. Outside our little neighborhood, though, it looked very, very much like the devastation of Katrina.
Damage in Swannanoa
The first week after the storm was hellacious. No power; no water; no phone; no wifi; no cable; no AC. Dark at 7 and no lights anywhere. The fridge and freezer silent. On the fourth day, we had to throw out all the food in both and scrub the interiors with bleach to kill the faint smell of mold.
With no water, we could not flush the toilets and, being unable to stop the physiology of the human body, we had to go somewhere. The commodes were becoming rank.
This was a problem that everyone shared, and so, by the second full day, neighbors had pulled together and set up a tent on the street corner where we could go, share stories, rumors and advice, and by the third day, they had food and bottled water to hand out to those who needed it. One neighbor had a swimming pool, and if you had a bucket, you could dip it in the pool for water to flush toilets.
Across the street from us, Dorothy, a retiree like us, and her grown son, Anthony, brought us a bucket so we could go down the street and dip it in the pool. Because we are old and five gallons of water is heavy, Anthony carried the water himself. That afforded us one flush a day. By the fourth day, Anthony had found a children’s wagon and was delivering flush water around the neighborhood. It was still once-a-day, though.
Neighbors helped neighbors. Some went house to house to check on them. Two fresh-faced young women knocked on our door. They had weak cell-phone coverage and had received a text message from my granddaughter in New York, a former schoolmate, asking them to check on grandpa. They sent a text back to her telling her that we were OK.
The street-corner tent set up a message-board where people could ask for supplies they needed, or to offer what they had. Our next-door neighbor, who had just moved in, had no food and we collected a few non-perishables and brought them over. Others came to us and gave us boxes of cereal or, in one case, an entire box of cellophane-wrapped brownies.
But it seemed as if we survived that first week eating little but apples and Fritos. I had a case of bottled water and some soft drinks.
“This is how are ancestors must have lived,” Anne said. “Except, they had water.” Dark all night, light for reading in the daytime. We read an average of a book a day during that first week, with little else to do but sit and wait. At night, we had candles burning on the piano — but not like Liberace: They were squat votive candles. And we would continue to read in the dark with flashlights.
There was a constant whirr and buzz, even through the night, of workmen chainsawing fallen trees and power crews trying to reattach downed lines. We saw trucks from out of state driving in caravans through the neighborhood, cleaning up and repairing 24 hours a day. Overhead there were helicopters and airplanes; hardly 10 minutes would go by before another one — or two at a time — skitted across the sky. It reminded me of film from Vietnam, except there were also drones.
And it was a huge military operation. National Guard and Marines, search-and-rescue operations looking for people cut off from roads or stranded on roofs, or dog teams looking for bodies in the debris. I have since heard ignorant people spout conspiracy theories about the failures of FEMA or the government in general, but those trolls weren’t there. I have never been so impressed at the seriousness and effectiveness of everyone, government or civilian working to recover. The lies being spouted are reprehensible. Actually, evil.
The Asheville airport was covered with military planes and scores of copters. The only way into the area for the first days was by air. I-40, the main highway, was cut off on both ends by landslides. The bridges along I-26 were washed out. All roads in and out of Buncombe County were blocked and closed. If we had wanted to leave, we couldn’t.
By Day 6, the mudslides blocking I-40 East had been provisionally cleared and road traffic could be resumed, and trucks with relief provisions could climb up the Blue Ridge into Asheville. Power had come back to our neighborhood (although many others remained dark). There was still no running water and all of our food had been ruined, except for those canned goods. We hadn’t had a shower in a week.
The problem for us was that the car had almost no gas left and no gas stations were open. But on Day 6, we got word from Anthony that a station in Fairmont — about six miles away — had reopened. We drove and miraculously, there was no line. We tanked up. We could leave.
Our first thought was to take a few days’ clothes and head to a motel in the flatlands, where the storm damage was less, and spend a couple of days getting cleaned and eating some hot food. We drove to Hickory, about a hour away, but found the motels were full. Outside of Hickory, we found one that had a single opening — the Presidential Suite for $180 a night — and we took it. The motels were not full of tourists; they were full of construction crews and aid workers: wiry, grizzled men with hard hats and leather-tanned faces who were commuting to Asheville to restore power or dig out debris. Their trucks filled the parking lot.
But we did get a hot shower and across the street there was a Mexican restaurant where we got a hot meal.
For the next two and a half weeks, we stayed with my brother- and sister-in-law in Reidsville, N.C., where they fed us and caught us up on all the events of the outside world we had missed. It would have felt like a vacation except for the hollow knot of anxiety in my gut. We drove home on Monday to find the house had not burned down, been burglarized or taken over by raccoons.
But there was still the problem of water. We are under a boil-water notice, which mandates — not suggests — that we boil the tap water for 1 minute before using it. It is still so cloudy that even after disinfecting it is not drinkable.
Blue Ridge Parkway damage
The storm was prodigious. Official reports note that 2,300 structures were destroyed completely or made uninhabitable. That’s homes, stores, and other businesses. The Blue Ridge Parkway was closed for its entire length in North Carolina and its director said that some 10,000 trees had fallen into the roadway. Parts of the Parkway were covered in landslide mud and other parts had their pavement washed away entirely. In several places the North Fork Swannanoa River has carved new courses, leaving at least one bridge over dry land and the water a hundred yards to the west.
Official death count for Western North Carolina totaled 96 (subject to revision as new data arrives), with 42 of them in Buncombe County alone. The NC total was nearly half of all deaths from Helene in the U.S.
There are reasons Western North Carolina was so hard hit. While the storm made landfall in Florida, and traveled north across Georgia and South Carolina before tailing out in Tennessee, those states suffered from hurricane and tropical storm damage alone — bad enough. But in Western North Carolina, the meteorological and geological circumstances doubled down on the effects.
I-40 Before and after
First, the area had already had days of rain soaking the ground before Helene. Second, the storm brought an enormous amount of water vapor — twice as much as the previous record from the 2004 double whammy of hurricanes Frances and Ivan. Third, the counterclockwise spin of the storm meant that its high winds struck the Blue Ridge escarpment head on, forcing the water-soaked air upwards, with both the Venturi effect speeding up the winds, and the adiabatic cooling that squeezed all that water out of the clouds, with Mt. Mitchell recording 24 inches and the Asheville airport getting 20 inches. One Forest Service weather station measured 31.33 inches of rain from September 25 to 27, piling Ossa on Pelion.
That’s bad enough. In flatter terrain, that would account for two feet of water over a wide landscape. But in the mountains, all that water gets funneled down into the valleys, where it collects in raging torrents, wiping away whole towns. Consider, say, five square miles of land, hit with two feet of water and condensing that water into a hundred-yard wide channel.
River Arts District, Asheville
That’s what happened along the Swannanoa River in the community of Swannanoa, along U.S. 70, where mountains both north and south dumped their drainage. Or along the French Broad River south of downtown Asheville, where the old industrial district, turned River Arts District, was wiped out. Or the narrow 14-mile Hickory Nut Gorge, which drops about 1,800 feet between the town of Gerton and Lake Lure, where much of the road is now reduced to a rocky creek bed.
There used to be a road here, Hickory Nut Creek
Estimates for the damage are currently set at $53 billion, although that is subject to revision. That is a North Carolina record.
I have concentrated on Asheville and Buncombe County because that is where I live. And I can see the destruction first-hand as I drive around. But it is much of Western North Carolina that shares the calamity.
French Broad River, Asheville
There is no guess as to when this part of the country will return to normal — although that will be a new normal, not the old one. Probably a year, at least. But people are all working hard to get there, individuals, civic officials, volunteer help and federal government. Some things have come back sooner than expected.
But so far, we are eating on paper plates and drinking from disposable cups and eating frozen Stouffer dinners and hoping with crossed fingers that our tap water will at sometime run clear again.
When I was a boy, in the 1950s, in an era not far removed from the Second World War, when Army surplus stores were common and provided much of the hardware we kids used for our play — helmet liners, canteens, mess kits, ammo boxes — we divided up into “good guys” and “bad guys,” just as we divided into cowboys and Indians. The good guys were American, of course, and the villains were “Japs” and Nazis. Usually Nazis.
But as boys, we pronounced the word as if it were pure American English: “Nah-zees,” where the first syllable had the “A” sound in “nap.” Nazees. It was only years later that we realized that in German, the word was closer to “Not-sees.”
And ever since, I have been fascinated by the way foreign words and names tend to get naturalized into something familiar on the tongue. We say “Paris,” and not “Paree.” “Moscow,” not “Muskva.” Cuba as “Kew-buh,” not “Koo-ba.”
I came across a piece recently by linguist Geoff Lindsey about this tendency, and the range of possibilities, and how the British and Americans tend to vary in the attempt. And also, how the Americans have lately tended to attempt to “un-nativize” foreign words and names — to varying degrees of success. Something we might call “collateral decolonization.”
Think of the automobile called the Jaguar. The English have subsumed the name into the habits of British English and say “Jag-you-are.” (Sounds a little like Yoda-speak.) The Americans go halfway and say “Jag-war.” The word originates in a native Brazilian language, where it was pronounced “Yag-wara” (“iaguara.”) The initial “I” gets transliterated by the conquering Portuguese as a “J,” and thereafter acquires the “dz” sound.
The Brits give us “Nick-uh-RAG-yoo-ah,” also, while in the U.S., we still mostly say “Nick-uh-ROG-wa.” Over the pond, the Brits put the “past” in “pasta,” where we soften the “A” into something closer to “pahstuh.”
Which is the better solution? You pays your money and takes your choice. Sometimes one is better, sometimes the other. In America, now richly influenced by Spanish, we tend to indiscriminately use the Latino vowel sounds we know from the Spanish we pick up in restaurants, even if we’re trying to say French or German words. Many Spanish words have become common in the U.S., and so we tend to sound them out better than Londoners, who shove a “tack” in “taco,” and a “dill” in “quesadilla.”
One has to remember how Lord Byron once rhymed the Guadalquivir river in the lines: “Don Juan’s parents lived beside the river,/ A noble stream, and call’d the Guadalquivir.” And, of course “Don Juan” was “Don Joo-un,” which he rhymes with “true one.”
But it isn’t only Spanish. The U.K. also has a hard time with French — or perhaps not a hard time so much as a natural and historical antipathy to all things Gallic — and can truly butcher French words. Americans don’t have an easier time with French vowels, either, but we tend to put the accent on the final syllables of French borrowings, to sound more French, such as “garage” and “massage,” while the English say “GAR-idge” and “MASS-ahdge.” They do the same to “salon” and “cafe,” with first syllable emphasis.
It isn’t just English, of course. Other languages face similar problems, when sounds that are common in one language are absent in the other. There is no “H” in Russian, for instance, and so they transliterate “Harry Potter” into a Cyrillic “Gary Potter” (or “Гарри Поттер”). “Ze French” don’t do the “TH” sound, so they have a monster of a time with English. There is no good “J” sound in Norwegian. I remember visiting the port of Kristiansand with my distant relative Anders Vehus and looking up at the bow of a docked ship named “Southern Jester,” and trying over and over to get him to pronounce it and getting “So-tern Yestair.” I would mouth the “J” and he would repeat “Y.” Over and over. (I had long given up on the “TH.”)
And so, Puerto Ricans tend to say “New Jork.” Familiar sounds planted in unfamiliar soil. Many American towns and cities were named after foreign places, and been given new pronunciations. Sometimes it is only the local population that knows that Calais in Maine is “Ka-less” or that Newark, which in New Jersey is mostly pronounced “Nerk,” but in Delaware is “New-Ark.”
There are a whole host of examples: Lima, Ohio, is “Lie-ma;” Pierre, S.D., is “Peer;” Cairo, Ill., is “Kayro” just like the syrup; in Illinois and Kentucky, they say “Athens” like the letter “A-thins;” Milan, Tenn., is “My-lin;” Versailles, Ky., and Ill., are “Ver-Sayles;” New Madrid, Mo., is “New MAD-drid.” There are others.
I particularly marvel at Pompeii, Mich., which is said as “Pom-pay-eye,” to account for the double letter “I” at the end. And, of course what is Houston in Texas, is a street in Manhattan called “How-ston.” And although it seems to be changing, old-timers Down East know that Mt. Desert Isle is “Mount Dessert.”
Most such locales were named in previous centuries, when people didn’t get around as much and awareness of different languages was scant. And so, in a more aware world, many Americans are trying to be more sensitive to names in other cultures. On the whole, this is undoubtedly a good thing.
But there are words and names that are buried deep in language history that are no longer foreign words, but naturalized English versions of them. We are not likely to start calling the French capital “Paree.” It’s not a French word. “Paris” is established English. Same with “Germany” rather than “Deutschland.” (Or “Alemania” in Spanish or “Niemcy” in Polish, “Tedesco” in Italian, or “Tyskland” in Swedish.
In English, we have hordes of such legacy names, unused in their native lands. Exonyms (what we call them) and endonyms (what they call themselves) are a common feature around the world. In English a selection includes: China for Zhōngguó; Egypt for Masr; we say “Japan,” they say “Nihon;” South Korea is Hanguk; Norway is Norge to the Norsk; Russia is Rossiya to Ivan; Spain is España; and many others. Among cities: Vienna is Wien; Copenhagen is København; Bangkok is Krung Thep; Florence is Firenze; Cologne is Köln; And in English, Roma will always be Rome.
There have been changes, or attempts at change. Some have taken, others haven’t. We are asked to use Myanmar instead of Burma; India has recently attempted to be called Bharat; we used to habitually call Ukraine, “the Ukraine,” just as Argentina used to be “the Argentine” — and still is in most Spanish usages — “l’Argentina”; there was a time when Cambodia asked us to call it Kampuchea, which it still is to itself; What was Kiev is now Kyiv; Mumbai was once Bombay in English.
China is a special problem, being a toned language and many regional dialects. Over time, what we now call Beijing has been “Peking,” Pekin,” “Peiping,” “Pei-p’ing,” “Beiping,” and “Pequim.” All various attempts at using the Roman alphabet for sounds that just don’t exist in Romance or Germanic languages. The Chinese government declared, in 1958, that the then-new Pinyin system of should be official, and since diplomatic normalization between mainland China and the U.S., in 1979, it has become almost universally adopted. And so, now, we all write “Beijing.” However, we still order Peking duck at the restaurant.
Sometimes, this sensitivity to other languages can go overboard, and we fix things that need no fixing. Called “hyperforeignism,” this is trying to sound more French than the French. We sometimes do it jokingly, like when we shop at “Tar-zhay.” But sometimes it slips by un-ironically, as when we say “Vishy-swa” when we mean “Vichyssoise. Taking that final “S” off the end sounds more French — I guess.
It can be quite comic. Striking a “coup de grâce” should end with an “S” sound. But if we want to sound sophisticated, we say “Koo-de-grah,” which, of course, actually means, in French (coup de gras) “Blow the fat.”
I once heard a college radio announcer tell us we were about to hear a symphony by “Gus-TAV Mah-LAY.” And sometimes you hear Hector “Bairly-O.” Overcorrection.
Because many Spanish words include the letter “Ñ,” sometimes Americans will add that tilde where one doesn’t belong, as saying the chile called the Habanero as if it were “Hab-an-nyair-o.” Sometimes we also add the tilde to “empanada” or conversely, take it away from “jalapeño.” (The British pronunciation rather combines both tendencies: “hala-peen-yo.”)
The desire to be “correct” can make you seem either pretentious or, perhaps a bit dippy. I remember watching my local newscaster, back in 1990, with the electoral overthrow of the Sandanistas, give us the news from “Nee-ha-RAH-wa,” which jumped uncomfortably out of his mouth in the middle of otherwise normal English wordage, with even a tiny hesitation as he shifted his mouth from English to his version of Spanish, and back. It was clear he was showing off, but it seemed quite offputting. Remember, “Nicaragua” is an English word, with a long habitation in our tongue.
It is a cultural battle, fought over centuries, between not wanting to sound like a rube, on one hand, nor to come across as too “Frenchified” and trying to be something you’re not. The line between the two extremes is constantly shifting, and has for centuries, and where it winds up in, say, 50 years, is impossible to predict. Language is fluid.
Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the greatest architects in history, and he’d tell you so, himself. The man in the cape and porkpie hat had an ego as big as any of his buildings, but as they say, if it’s true, it ain’t bragging.
It is so tempting to dismiss Wright. He was a monster of egotism. His taste could be appallingly bad. He spoke in egregious platitudes. He abandoned children and wives. He was arrested for violating the Mann Act. He made life a misery for almost everyone around him. And what is worse: His roofs leaked. For an architect, that may be the worst sin.
But no matter how irritating, Wright cannot be dismissed. It matters not that he insisted he was the greatest architect in American history. (“Why limit it to America?,” he then asked.) The fact remains that no architect of our time — and probably not of any other time — has had so fertile an imagination or produced so many outstanding buildings.
That is undoubtedly the most infuriating thing about Wright: He didn’t only talk the talk, he walked the walk.
“I hated him, of course,” said waspish architect Philip Johnson, “but that’s only normal when a man is so great.”
From his early Prairie Style homes near Chicago to his giant spiral Guggenheim Museum in New York, Wright kept inventing new ideas. “Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves,” he once said.
The man is difficult to pin down because, not only did he change constantly over his 90-plus years of life, he also notoriously lied about everything. He was always making orotund pronouncements and declarations, but not a one of them stands without careful checking.
England has its eccentrics, its beekeeping vicars and parish historians, but America requires something more grandiose.
America has crackpots.
The crackpot differs from the mere eccentric in his missionary zeal, his transcendent ego, his absolute certainty and his touch of utopianism. From Henry Thoreau to Ezra Pound, from Charles Ives to Harry Partch, American art and culture have been defined by crackpots. Something in the American character warms to them. Something of the best of America can be found in them.
It is important to remember that. So much has been written and said about the architect, and with such reverence and hype. It is not that I mean to debunk Wright; he was a singular genius and must be recognized as such.
But he also was a true American crackpot, and we need to remember not only the dynamic imagination and idiosyncratic design, but also the odd geezer in the black cape and cane who wrote crank letters to the president. We need to remember the despotic man who installed glass bars instead of windows in his most famous industrial commission, Wisconsin’s Johnson Wax building, because he declared, “No one should have to look out at Racine.”
There are several things that join to make Wright’s work justifiably the most celebrated by any American architect. First among these was his uncanny sense of space.
What makes architecture work, and particularly Wright’s architecture, is the shape of its insides, the particular chunk of air it surrounds with walls. To experience architecture is to walk through it, sit down in it, see where the space seems to grow and shrink as you pass through.
So many of us live and work in simple boxlike rooms — little boxes inside bigger boxes — we don’t always remember that rooms don’t have to be that way. “Break the box,” was one of Wright’s war cries. And in his buildings, he constantly did just that. Instead of boxes of rooms off a hallway, Wright created vast open spaces, one room opening into another. In his own home, called Taliesin, in Wisconsin, you can stand in the center of the house and see out of it in all four directions.
Wright recreated for us that sense we had more easily when children that space can have emotional meaning, building “forts,” or climbing in tree houses of discovering caves in the hillsides. Adults can have those emotions, too. And great architecture can provide the adult emotions that are analogous to those childhood ones. I can write about thoe spaces and you can see pictures, but pictures of them don’t do it. You can only have those emotions when standing in those places.
Even with his earliest buildings, the Prairie style homes, he attempted to reduce the number of rooms and create large flowing spaces, part of which might serve as dining area and part as living room. They would be built at different levels and sometimes at different angles, all to obliterate the hated “‘box.” In his best buildings, you can feel as if you are standing outside when you are actually indoors, and indoors when you are out.
The second great strength of Wright’s work is its unceasing originality. Wright ideally approached each design as a completely new problem, to be solved in its unique way. This means that, unlike the work of his great contemporary Mies van der Rohe and his International style, there is not, after the Prairie style, a single “look” that can be identified as Wright’s. For Wright, “what we did yesterday, we won’t do today.”
Mies groused back, “You don’t start a new style each Monday.”
But because he did start out each Monday, Wright has given us a startling variety of invention. It is true that not all the work is of equal value, but it is hard to find another artist in any medium who so thoroughly reinvented himself with each idea.
I was architecture critic for most of my 25 years living in Phoenix, Ariz., where Wright had his second home and architecture school later in his life (Taliesin West in Scottsdale), and I was immersed in Wright hype and legend. I got to visit many of the most notable Wright buildings across the country, and I came to recognize and value his genius (there really is no other word for it), but I also came to know and loathe the man himself. I will try to do justice to both.
Architecture has four main components. First, there is the sculptural aspect, the shape a building cuts. It is what most people think of as architecture: the building as seen from the outside.
Second, there is the engineering. Wright was both an innovative engineer and an occasionally casual one. His innovations are myriad; his lapses legendary.
Third, there is the interior design aspect. Early in his career, Wright was especially good at this, and it is the part of his work that comes across best in photographs. The windows, the tables, the carpets he chose are beautiful, refined and subtle. Later in his career, his design became garish and loopy. But it is still what people know best.
But the fourth part of architecture is arguably the most important aesthetically. It is the essence of architecture: the emptiness inside. And Wright’s particular genius is his way with space, the way he orchestrates large and small spaces, to stimulate your emotions as only great art can.
Wright was especially concerned with how one room led to another, how a low ceiling makes you feel, or how nooks make magic. He called space “the invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow and through which they must pass.” These are things that cannot be conveyed in pictures; you have to be there, in the rooms, to sense their splendor.
It is like pictures and writings about Beethoven: No matter how good the text, it cannot tell you what the music sounds like. You have to experience it. So, photographs still cannot show its readers what truly made Wright the special case he was. No one invented interior space more creatively. Wright was not merely inventive, he was revolutionary. On the scale of Stravinsky, Picasso, Brecht or Eisenstein.
People easily mistake the outside of a building as its “architecture.” For most people, architecture is a kind of very large, inhabitable sculpture. And there is certainly that aspect to the art. We recognize the Chrysler Building immediately, or the U.N. Building, from their outsides. But how many people can say what the insides of these buildings look like?
Wright’s essential genius was not that of a sculptor. In fact, some of his buildings are almost ugly. No, his genius was for the empty space inside a building. He changed utterly and forever our idea of what an interior could be. Wright was a creator of empty spaces. Really interesting empty spaces. He approached a building with the air inside it as a kind of armature for the exterior.
He found 2,000 years of architecture in which square rooms inhabited square buildings, one set of cubes inside a larger one, and broke it open, breaking down walls and finding new ways of dividing the space enclosed by the exteriors.
Like Stravinsky or Picasso, Wright constantly changed styles, from the Prairie Style of his early residences to the “Planet Mongo” style he sometimes devolved into in his later years. But like Stravinsky and Picasso, the style itself was never the point. Stravinsky may rush from the lush Firebird to the astringent L’Histoire du Soldat, but underlying it all is an irony. You cannot imagine Stravinsky without the irony. Picasso has his plastic inventiveness — that shows through whether he’s doing Cubism or Neoclassicism.
And Wright always has his empty spaces. Every corner you turn brings a discovery: a room bigger or smaller than you expect, a space that stretches out in interesting ways, or closes you in and makes you cozy. You can like or dislike the decorative style in which Wright worked, but you cannot help but be astonished at the way he makes you feel inside a space.
He was born in Wisconsin in 1867 and began work in the Chicago area in the 1880s, soon becoming one of the most innovative and stylish architects working. His Prairie Style homes from the early 1900s became his signature look.
But by 1909, the 42-year-old wunderkind felt he was losing his grip on his work, “even interest in it,” he wrote. So he left his wife and six children and ran off to Europe with the wife of one of his clients. The scandal affected his practice, and Wright moved into a period of relative obscurity. He built his first Taliesin in 1911 as “a hope and a haven” for himself.
Many artists have written their autobiographies, but Frank Lloyd Wright built his. It sits near the top of a hill in southern Wisconsin near the town of Spring Green and looks out over farm fields and forests. Wright titled his architectural autobiography “Taliesin.” It was his home.
But three years later, that first house burned down in a tragedy of epic proportions when a workman went berserk, took an ax and slaughtered Wright’s mistress, two of her children and four other people, then set fire to the building. Wright was out of town at the time. The scandal was front page news across the country.
He rebuilt immediately. The blow left him numb, but, as he wrote, “There is release from anguish in action. Anguish would not leave Taliesin until action for renewal began. … Steadily, again, stone by stone, board by board Taliesin the II began to rise from the ashes of Taliesin the first.”
And so did Wright’s career. He took a new direction once more, a commission in Tokyo to build the Imperial Hotel, which opened in 1923.
In 1925, a second fire razed Taliesin. Again, he built it up, even using stones from the first two incarnations in the walls of the third.
He went on to design some of the landmark buildings of the century: the Johnson Wax Building in Wisconsin and Fallingwater, a summer home for the Kaufmann family, in Pennsylvania, and a long series of distinguished private and public buildings.
Many of the design and engineering innovations he used in those buildings had their “off-Broadway” run at Taliesin, as Wright built and rebuilt the house. By his own account Taliesin was never finished.
It is one of the most beautiful houses I’ve ever seen. Every angle and corner has something rich and meaningful to give up. One of the other party tricks Wright pulls on us is that, however stunning the living room is while you are standing in it, it is even more glorious when you sit down. Then, the long walls of windows become frames for the landscape outside. Standing, there is greenery, but no horizon; sitting, the horizon cuts halfway through the glass frame, making the windows like another spread-out Japanese screen.
The house is amazing. Wright always said he wanted to “break the box,” by which he meant he wanted to avoid the sense that each room had four walls and a door. So he opened up his house. It is rare to find a corner, for instance: When you approach what looks like a corner, it opens up to display some unexpected nook or hallway. So that, at dead-center of the house, you might almost be standing outdoors: There is a four-direction view.
At that point, standing in the hallway just where it opens into the den, you can look to the north through the living room and see the Wisconsin hillsides; then turn to the east and see more through that room’s glass walls; then turn south and peek through the distant windows of Wright’s office and bedroom, to see the hillside with the house called Tan-y-deri and the windmill that pumped the estate’s water; then, finally, turn west and see the top of Taliesin’s hillside and the garden and greenery surrounding the tea circle where Wright and his apprentices met for discussion.
Almost any room you enter will require you to duck and scrunch down as you worm through the hallway or entry or door and then feel the weight of the universe lifted from you as the room expands upon your entry. It is a party trick, no doubt, but one Wright plays with great relish and effect.
I could go on, waxing ecstatic over other Wright buildings I have visited, from Fallingwater in Pennsylvania to the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, California. I have always been astonished by what I saw. But there is the other Frank Lloyd Wright, the liar, cheater, fraudster and prophet of some of the worst developments in civic life.
The shopping mall concept, it can be argued, began with a government building by Wright. In 1957, the equivalent of a Steven Spielberg “mother ship” landed on a woody hillside in San Rafael, Calif. It was the Marin County Civic Center and, from the outside, it was one of Wright’s “Planet Mongo” designs — odd, ungainly and a model of kitsch.
But inside … inside it was truly original. It placed the county governmental offices several stories high along the outer walls of the complex, with balconies running the length of the building overlooking a pedestrian walking space. You could look down at the “storefront” offices and the ferns and plantings along the fountains and escalators.
When you visit the building, you can’t help but think: shopping mall. Brilliant, but I don’t know how grateful we should be for all the soulless malls we find filled with T.J. Maxes and Sbarros.
That Flash Gordon esthetic increasingly began to take over Wright’s design esthetic as he got older. In his early years, Wright was at the forefront of Modernism in architecture and his best work — those Prairie-style houses, the Johnson Wax building — have remained ever fresh and new. But in his senescence, many of his designs have become dated, like those futuristic book illustrations filled with dirigibles and autogiros.
Instead of modern, he became what might be called “modernistical.” As in his design for the First Christian Church in Phoenix, with its science-fiction spires and reptile-scale roof.
Then, there was Wright’s hatred of cities — an odd opinion for a builder of buildings. He called them “a persistent form of social disease,” and when asked in Pittsburgh what could be done to improve the city architecturally, he replied, “Tear it down.”
And he singled out New York for special opprobrium, biblical in its rancor. He compared it to Sodom and Gomorrah, complained that it was the city of Cain. He called it “a pig pile. A fibrous tumor. Is this city not Anti-Christ?” and said it was “a place fit for banking and prostitution and not much else.”
He once said the only logical place to build a skyscraper was in the desert, where the height could afford a view worth seeing. And he designed a skyscraper a mile high, never built, of course.
“Mile-high? Why stop there? Why not two miles, or even five miles, if need be?” he asked a friend. (The irony is that the Burj Khalifa, which is a quarter-mile high, was built in the desert, and although not designed by Wright, did borrow his plan for making the footprint of the building a triangle, giving it the stability of a tripod).
The fruit of this dislike was a vision of suburbia. Wright cannot exactly be said to have invented the suburban prototype Levittown, but he certainly predicted it in his 1932 plans for the fictional Broadacre City. Wright envisioned a sprawling suburbia, created out of minitowns, or self-contained neighborhoods, linked by automobile and tree-lined roadways.
If the thrust of American growth was upward, Wright cast his vote for outward. But we now live with the results of that thinking: It’s most extreme embodiment is Los Angeles, sprawling neighborhoods over an area the size of some Eastern states. It is Broadacre City metastasized.
Wright was as bad as Wagner when it comes to breaking up families. In the 1930s, the architect left his wife and six children and ran off to Europe with Mamah Cheney, who was the wife of one of his principal clients. Wright was notorious, at least in his younger years, for having the sexual morality of an alley cat.
He was a monster of self-regard. “Not only do I fully intend to be the greatest architect who has yet lived, but fully intend to be the greatest architect who will ever live. Yes, I intend to be the greatest architect of all time,” he wrote.
There is a famous TV interview with Mike Wallace, from 1953, where the man spouts off in the most irritatingly smug fashion, about his own greatness. When Wallace asks him if he said something about being the greatest architect of the 20th century, Wright answered, “You know, I may not have said it, but I may have felt it.” Actually, he did say it, many times. He also wanted to claim humility as one of his great virtues.
Much of the interview is a piling up of fatuous truisms and platitudes. “The answer is, within yourself.” That kind of thing, but spoken as if he were giving us pearls of wisdom from Zarathustra in his mountain cave. (The interview is available on YouTube.)
Nothing sums up his dabbling in fraud and mendacity as his involvement with the construction of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix. It was opened in 1929, designed by architect Albert Chase McArthur. Yet, tourists visiting Arizona are often told that the Arizona Biltmore was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It wasn’t, although, as we’ll see, Wright sometimes took credit.
There are two things to note about the resort and hotel. First is that Wright was given $10,000 as a license fee by McArthur, for permission to use the patented “textile-block” technique. Problem was, the patent wasn’t Wright’s. It was invented elsewhere by others. Wright had previously used the technique and found no reason to disabuse McArthur of the idea the technique was his to license. Wright was later sued by the true patent owners and had to pay up.
When McArthur contacted Wright about using the textile-block system, the Chicago architect telegraphed back that he would be there immediately, and in January 1928 he showed up at the door.
In another of the changing stories, Wright’s stay in Phoenix stretched out longer and longer. Early sources say Wright was here anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. A little bit later, Wright claimed he worked on the Biltmore for six months. And in a public speech made a few years before his death, he claimed, “I spent a whole year at it.”
In reality, the visit was probably less than a week, after which McArthur had had enough of the overbearing Wright and sent him packing.
“The contractor was complaining about his interference,” McArthur says, “and when Wright refused to pay his rent for the house he was living in, they came with the police and evicted him. Wright said, ‘I don’t have to pay rent; I’m Frank Lloyd Wright.’ ”
McArthur had previously worked for Wright in Chicago from 1909 to 1911, performing various jobs and soaking up the influences. He later set up a practice of his own there.
It is one of the marks of Wright’s tenacious mendacity that each time he later recalled McArthur, Wright’s memory of McArthur’s tenure with him got shorter, until, late in his career, Wright claimed that McArthur “had spent a few months” with him.
It is important to note this, because Wright’s lack of generosity to his fellow architect becomes a major part of the Biltmore story, and a contributor to the mythology.
Wright’s version of his participation in the design also changed over the years. Shortly after the hotel opened, he wrote a letter saying, “Albert McArthur is the architect of that building. All attempts to take the credit for that performance from him are gratuitous and beside the mark.”
In fact, Wright thought the hotel was a botch. He criticized the building as “even worse” than he had imagined. “Far from being a great work of art, (it is) lacking even the most primitive elements of good design.”
Yet, when the hotel became popular and its architecture praised, Wright changed his story. In his notoriously inaccurate and self-serving autobiography of 1943, he appears to see himself as the master architect working sub rosa for the “architect of record.”
And in a lecture in 1957, he answered a woman’s question by saying, “This lady wants to know if I designed the Arizona Biltmore hotel, and I did.”
Wright went on to tell the audience, “There was a young student of mine who had the commission. He never built anything but a house, so they sent for me to help out and I helped out. So that’s the Arizona Biltmore.” Of course, by that time, Albert Chase McArthur had been dead for six years and could hardly defend himself.
Mendacity the great speed bump of Wright’s personality: arrogant, often supercilious, egocentric and selfish. Wright could belittle those around him, fail to acknowledge their contributions, and he could be frustratingly patronizing. He lied, committed fraud, failed to pay bills. Biographers have been unraveling the lies he told about himself for years.
When Brendan Gill wrote his 1987 biography of Wright, Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, he had to spend a good deal of his time debunking Wrightian lies. The architect used to tell the story that when his mother was pregnant with him, she had already decided he was going to be an architect and hung his nursery with engravings of English cathedrals cut from a magazine. Yet, the magazine engravings in question weren’t published until Wright was a teen-ager, and the tiny house they lived in at the time was too cramped to have a nursery.
He even lied about his name: He was born Frank Lincoln Wright.
He was a monster. We are unfortunately too familiar these days with the concept of the malignant narcissist. Yet, there is an important difference: Wright was also a genius.
When I go to any decent-size bookstore, I can find one or two books about any of the names you read about in architecture — Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster — but there are two-and-a-half shelves on Wright, and he’s been dead for 65 years.
ENVOY
It has become common to conflate artists with their work. And artists are rarely angels. If we no longer watch Woody Allen movies, or appreciate Picasso’s paintings because their creators were fallible, even monstrous (Byron diddled his sister; Shelley had a things for underage girls; Wagner was a vicious anti-Semite) then we are likely to be required to excise more than half of all of the creations of civilization — maybe all of it, depending on where you draw the line.
Caravaggio was a murderer; Lewis Carroll enjoyed taking photographs of nude little girls; Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Hector Berlioz were drug fiends. They — and we — are all human and bundles of contradiction. For their crimes, we may prosecute them, as we do anyone else. For their simpler sins, we develop short memories. For what they have given us, we need to be grateful.
When faced with some difficult problem of geometry or algebra, I usually just throw up my hands and say, “Don’t look at me, I was an English major.” I’ve noticed, however, that Anne will always phrase that a little differently. She say would shrug and say, “I’m an English major.”
The difference in tense speaks to how we each view ourselves and our place in the world. When it comes to things such as grammar or usage, I tend to be more flexible while Anne has more in common with a British sergeant-major. For her, there is right and there is wrong.
Of course, there are those more lax than I am and some more unbending than Anne. It is a spectrum. I have many peeves about poor usage, and especially misused words. I admit the definitions of such words as “enormity” and “disinterested” are changing and in the future they will mean whatever their speakers intend them to mean. But for now, it gives me hives when I hear a newscaster say, “There are less people having babies now.” Drives me nuts. But for Anne, this is not so much fighting a rear-guard action against change, as building a fortress against incoherence. “Things mean what they mean; illiteracy is no excuse.”
To gauge where you fall in the spectrum, consider a simple sentence: “Who did you give the book to?” There are two things “wrong” with this sentence, but how you intend to fix it, or fix it at all, may help you decide.
If you are one of those people who still believe that a sentence should not end with a preposition, then you will change it to, “To who did you give the book?” But that sounds all wrong. No one would actually say that.
And that’s because of the other problem — “who” should be “whom.” And so it becomes “To whom did you give the book?” But that can sound pedantic. So, you choose one mistake over the other and wind up with, “Whom did you give the book to?”
So, you pick your poison. Of course, in reality, you wouldn’t say any of these. What you would actually say is “Hooja give the book to?” And language is filled with hoojas.
We don’t speak word-by-word, but in phrases, and those phrases become units all their own. “Jeet jet?” Did you eat yet? “I’m gonna sell the old Ford.” “I dunno what is correct.” Sometimes these vocal elisions make it back into print. How many times have you seen “I would of gone” instead of “I would have gone?” But, of course, this isn’t so much an illiteracy but a back-transference from spoken language. You say, “I would’ve gone.” If that’s what you hear, you might very well think you’ve heard “would of” and then use it in your Tweet.
These back-transferences now often make it into print, mostly in dialog in fiction, to make the speech sound more natural. Ultimately, these have a chance to become standard English, and in the same way that “a nuncle” became “an uncle” by printing what the ear heard. At some point in the future, it will be in the Chicago Manual of Style to write, “We’re gonna study alot of stuff we dunno much about.”
That brings up “a lot,” which is one of the main bugbears for Anne. She yells at the page when she comes across “alot.” The word bothers me, too, but not as much as it rankles her. And I have to admit that at some point in the not-too-distant future, it will be common in dictionaries.
That’s how languages go. What is an ugly and ignorant solecism in one age becomes propriety in the next. Garish new money becomes respectable old money when the billionaire entrepreneur is knighted.
So, language changes, but almost never by fiat. Suggestions can be made. They may catch on, they may not.
One of the most successful came with Noah Webster’s desire to create a “more American” spelling. His 1806 Compendious Dictionary of the English Language sought to simplify spelling. Eventually, his changes caught on and we now spell “color” without a superfluous “u,” and “theater” with the “e” in its functional place.
Among British language reformers were George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Alfred Tennyson, and Charles Dickens. A Simplified Spelling Society was created in 1908 (currently, the English Spelling Society). America had its own Simplified Spelling Board, begun two years earlier, with a grant from Andrew Carnegie. President Theodore Roosevelt issued an order for all federal documents to adopt the suggested new spellings. That lasted short while. The old spellings were soon re-instated. The Louisville Courier-Journal published an article ridiculing him, which stated: “Nuthing escapes Mr. Rucevelt. No subject is tu hi fr him to takl, nor tu lo for him to notis.”
But if these things can’t be imposed from above, they can take hold from below. Consider the effect of Twitter and the Internet on language: “R U There?” Texting language now occasionally shows up in print. Expect more of it.
Language changes because there is a need, or because the newer versions seem simpler, or get adopted because technology or culture changes.
There are those who want to invent new pronouns to accommodate the rising awareness of gender fluidity. Some new words have been floated, such as “xe,” “xyr,” “em,” or “fae.” None has caught on. Given time, one of these may win out and may become normal. I don’t count on it. But the use of a so-called “singular they,” has long infiltrated common usage: “Everyone should take their hat off.” Solves an awkward problem (“his or her” is just cumbersome) and has actually been hiding in the language for centuries, no matter what edicts are handed down from hide-bound grammarians.
The last time a new gender-bound word has successfully entered the language was “Ms.” It is now used by almost everyone, and by many who don’t even know it was lobbied for in the 1970s when Ms. magazine first began publication. (And first proposed as far back as 1901). It is just a normal part of our vocabulary now, although those of us who remember when it was new can recall the angry backlash that came from the stodgier sections of our society.
Another group wants to get rid of apostrophes in contractions. Dont need them, they say. Context makes the meaning clear. “What Id like to study is the human id.” “Dont eat the yellow snow.” There are very few places where the meaning isnt clear, and even with the apostrophes, there is plenty of confusion in the language.
Linguist Geoff Lindsey points out that in spoken language, we don’t really ever hear the “t” in such words as “can’t.” That when we speak them, the difference between “can” and “can’t” isn’t in the “t” but in the vowel. If you say, “I can’t do it,” you actually say, “I can’ do it.” But you pronounce the “a” as the “a” in “bad,” while when you say “I can do it,” the vowel goes like “ken” — “I ken do it.”
So perhaps we don’t need the “t” — or perhaps we can just take out the apostrophe and say “cant.” And then write “ken” when we mean the opposite.
I’m not sure eliminating such apostrophes would make up for the number of supererogatory apostrophes added to create plurals. This is an ugliness that leaves me feeling like King Canute before the sea. It makes me hiccup every time I see it, but I am powerless to stop the rising tide. Perhaps in 40 or 50 years, even the Chicago Manual of Style will accept it as standard.
There are many normal progressions in the history of languages, expected simplifications and sometimes added complexities. Words that used to be two words became hyphenated expressions and then turned into compound words. Cellphone used to be cell phone; webpage was once web page, then, briefly web-page; hotdog was hot dog. English moves in the direction of eliding these words back down to one.
It has been pointed out that the perfect tense in English is fading. Where we once said “Have you finished yet” we often say instead, “Did you finish yet.”
Irregular verbs are being replaced by regularized versions. I remember when I was a journalist and required to use Associated Press style, we had to used “burned” instead of “burnt,” or “dived” instead of “dove.” I liked the older words with more taste in the mouth. But the direction of our language is toward regularization, at least in words less seldom used. We now sneaked instead of snuck; pleaded instead of pled; dreamed instead of dreamt. Maybe at some point “I did it,” will become “I dood it.”
Also, as we head into the soft middle years of the new century, borrowings from Spanish will become more common. They’ve always been there, from rodeo to hoosegow, but newer ones will proliferate. English has always been promiscuous and up to 80 percent of our vocabulary has been acquired from other languages (depending on your starting point — where was English first English and not related at all to what we speak now?).
And speech is the important issue. English has had a relatively quiescent period for the past several hundred years, as the language has been held steady by print. But as electronic media take over, spoken language is becoming more central, whether spoken on television or radio, or mimicked in texting and tweeting. Before print, English spelling varied widely. It looks like that Wild West of orthography could be our future.
And if so, then the hoojas will take over the tongue. And the didjas, the woodjas, the havyas and canyas.
I was once taken aback, talking with my young twin granddaughters about what movies they liked, that they refused, flat out, to consider any movie made in black and white. Not even a question. Jamais. Never.
For them, black-and-white meant antique, superannuated, something with no relevance to their lives. They wouldn’t even see a current movie if it was in black and white. Life was color; monochrome was irrelevant.
There are other disqualifications that some people maintain. “Read any good movies lately?” They won’t see a film with subtitles, which, of course, cuts out an entire half (at least) of all movie history and some of the greatest films ever.
But by far, the biggest disqualification for the majority of filmgoers is what are called silent movies — movies made from the invention of the medium through roughly 1930, when sound synchronization became the standard.
Without sound, dialog becomes disruptive title cards held motionless for long moments, long enough that the slowest readers in the audience can parse their way through; audio clues, such as traffic noises or train whistles are mute; and worse — actors have to act like semaphore signals to convey their thoughts and feelings. Silent movie acting seems grotesquely over-the-top, more like pantomime than anything we now consider proper acting.
There are other problems, too. In the earlier days of movie-making, frame speed was not standardized, and to complicate matters, most cameras were hand-cranked, which means that the idiosyncratic crank-timing of the cameraman could vary quite a lot. This meant that for decades, long after sound had taken over, and movies began showing up on TV, the old films were projected at the wrong speed, too fast, making everything herky-jerky.
And, because the studios that made those old films never thought of them as anything but disposable entertainment, there was no incentive to archive them or care for the old prints. Add to that, they were made with flammable nitrate film stock, which deteriorated over time, and that there were several devastating studio fires that consumed whole catalogs, what is left is often only a fossilized remnant of what the old films actually were. As a result, an estimated 70 percent of all the movies made before 1930 are lost. Ceased to be. Gone to meet their maker. Joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.
And what survived was seen most often in poorly made copies of copies, bleached out, scratchy, grainy and out of focus. As if silent film technology was roughly akin to the Stone-Age chipping of flint arrowheads.
But that is not what they were when they were made, as we have seen when film restoration has brought us clean prints of some of the more important movies from the era. The photography was as good as anything done currently. The motions of the actors, when projected at the proper speed seem less silly.
You can look at the development of cinema from its earliest beginnings in the 19th century as a constant advance, not only of technology, but of the esthetics of film. At first, a stationary camera just records a few things in front of it. Later, the camera learns how to move. Film learns to tell stories and directors figure out how to edit bits of film together to make those stories move faster and express more. Wholesale changes in blocking, acting, lighting, editing, camera angles and motion all add to the growing sophistication of the art. There are the traditional mileposts in this development: the close-up; the intercutting; the over-the-shoulder back and forth; the use of double-exposure; and of matting.
By the time sound came in, intermittently beginning in 1927 or so (the dates are hard to pin down, depending on how complete the process was and which competing technology was used), silent film had become a fully developed art form, capable of expressing a huge range of thought and emotion. In fact, the advent of sound caused more problems than it solved, and the constraints of microphones and movie-set noise, took away some of the expressive possibilities of the silents.
Cameras tended to stay still (they often had to be ensconced in stationary booths or sound-cancelling “blimps” so that the microphones wouldn’t pick up the noise of the machinery) and actors needed to stay still near the microphones. Films became more stagey and set-bound. Early sound films often looked more like recorded stage plays.
Worse, because sound made dialog possible, much was explained rather than shown and talkies became rather talky. The best continued the old dictum, “show, don’t tell,” but it became economically advantageous to let the tongues do the talking rather than the images.
Alfred Hitchcock, who had been making artistically sophisticated silent films, initially thought that “the silent pictures were the purest form of cinema,” and the first talkies were little beside “photographs of people talking.”
All this has been well covered by myriad books and videos about the history of Hollywood. But there is one aspect of silent films that has too often been neglected, and that is that they were never silent films.
During their era, movies were always accompanied by either a live orchestra playing in the pit, a pianist, or an organist. Major features usually had a bespoke musical score that was distributed along with the film, so that orchestras in the large theaters could play along with the movie. In smaller venues, a piano or organ reduction would be provided. For lesser films, music publishers provided regular cues — short bits of piano score describing certain types of action or emotion — for the in-house pianist to improvise from.
The process was very like the incidental music written — often by major composers — for stage plays. Mendelssohn’s music for Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Grieg’s for Peer Gynt, for instance. Several major composers, such as Camille Saint-Saens, also wrote scores for movies.
Or more apt, like the music that accompanied ballet. Tchaikovsky or Leo Delibes or Prokofiev would write music to order, according to the needs of a dance scenario. “I need three minutes of mazurka for Act 2,” the composer might be told, and would produce it on order. We think of composers being divinely inspired by their muses and pumping out symphonies, but really, they often made a living as subcontractors, part of the team that produced popular entertainment. Even Beethoven wrote incidental music and ballets.
So, the tradition of writing music for films was much like that for ballet. It would be silly to imagine Swan Lake with no music, only dancers. But nobody would ever call ballet, “silent theater.”
But the first time I ever saw The Birth of a Nation was at my college film series where it was run with no sound. I complained to the projectionist that he forgot to turn on the audio and he looked at me like I was an ignoramus. “It’s a silent film; there is no sound.” Yes, there is, and it was written for the movie by composer Joseph Carl Breil who created a three-hour-long musical score made up of adaptations of existing works by classical composers, new arrangements of well-known melodies, and original composed music. (The British Film Institute’s Blu-Ray restoration of the film includes Breil’s music). (Although, if you never get a chance to see Birth of a Nation and its promotion of racism and the Ku Klux Klan, you may be intellectually poorer, but your soul will be so much cleaner.)
It helps to keep the ballet model in mind when considering silent film. Movies developed together with the music that accompanied them, and we would appreciate them more if we saw them that way.
Of course, the basic level of appreciation is the story being told, and most movie-goers even in those early years, were there for the plot. Good over evil; love conquers all; the hero saves the maiden.
But we, watching now, should notice not just that surface level, but also how the movie was made: How the director uses a moving camera to advance the story; how the lighting underlines the mood of a scene; how the editing manages to keep us up-to-speed on parallel plot points, back and forth; how the close-up lets us into the mind of the actor.
And so, watching a silent film should be more like watching the dance. It is a different art form from sound film, and one that needs to be understood in its own way. The story drives the action in Swan Lake too, but we watch for the dancing and choreography.
I have a list of 10 silent films that demonstrate what the silent film can do. Recent film restorations have improved image quality, when a print can be struck from the original studio negative, and with restored musical scores, either from original sources, or new scores written in period style.
We’ll go from the easiest to understand and love to more adventurous films. In my experience, one of the best places to start is Buster Keaton’s Civil War film, The General.
The General
Keaton’s 1926 story is easy to follow, as Southern railroad engineer Johnny Gray spends most of the movie chasing a locomotive stolen by Yankee forces and then being chased by them. There are plenty of gags — Keaton was a genius with those — but also a comprehensible plot, easy to follow, and believable. Keaton’s direction is always clear, and with many exceptionally beautiful or intricate shots. The most expensive special effect shot of its time was later copied for The Bridge on the River Kwai, as Keaton has a train crashing off a burning bridge, followed by a dam breaking and a flood washing soldiers downriver. It’s a great film and for a wide audience. One of the great films of all times, silent or sound.
Metropolis
Fritz Lang’s 1926 sci-fi masterpiece has benefitted more than most from restoration. Seen previously in shortened versions, a new version has most of the missing footage returned so that story begins to make sense (even at its best, the plot never really made much sense). But it has some of the most stunning visuals ever put in front of a camera. It is a glorious film to watch, even if the acting sometimes seems maybe a smidge over the top. Despite that, it is also one of the greatest films of all time, and one of the most influential.
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
This 1927 Alfred Hitchcock thriller is a masterpiece of visual storytelling. Called the “first true Hitchcock film,” it plays with the fear raised by a Jack-the-Ripper style murderer in London and a mysterious lodger in a boarding house who may or may not be the killer. The film is chock full of Hitchcockian ticks, including a “wrong-man” plot, the obsession with blondes, and the plot-twist ending.
These three films offer little problem to the modern viewer and can be seen with little forgiveness needed for their lack of spoken dialog.
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The next three are milestones in technical experimentation and the invention of cinematic conventions that are in common use today
Battleship Potemkin
In 1925, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein told a story of the aborted 1905 rebellion through a version of the mutiny aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin. The film uses editing as fast as an MTV video to further the story, and inventing the montage. The section called “The Odessa Steps” still carries as much punch as anything ever made.
Napoleon
French filmmaker Abel Gance intended to make six films covering the life of Napoleon, but only finished the first. But it is five and a half hours long and uses many experimental techniques, putting his camera on a swing, or on the back of a galloping horse.
And in its climax, using three cameras and three movie screens to make a precursor version of Cinerama — huge widescreen images. It is an astonishing film for 1927.
The Passion of Joan of Arc
It sometimes seems as if Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc is entirely made up of close-ups of lead actress Maria Falconetti’s anguished face. But if proof was ever needed of the power of human expression, this movie is Exhibit A. It is emotionally overwhelming.
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The next three films are documentaries, made before documentary film became hamstrung by an inflexible puritan ethic (fooey on you, Frederick Wiseman). Some use recreations and re-enactments, but give us real information nonetheless.
Häxan
Häxan, from 1925, is a Swedish film that investigates the phenomenon of witchcraft through the ages. It was banned or censored in many places for its anticlericism, nudity, and depictions of depravity, but ultimately comes down on the side of modern understandings of schizophrenia, hallucination and bigotry to explain the witch stories. It is mostly filmed recreations by actors, but tells a real story.
Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life
From 1925, the story of Grass’s creation is as breathtaking as the story it tells of the annual migration of 50,000 of Iran’s Bakhtiari people across the vast Zagros mountain range with their cattle. Stunning landscapes and death-defying river crossings, all captured on film by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, and Marguerite Harrison (Cooper and Schoedsack later made King Kong). The filmmakers took the migration along with the tribespeople, and suffered all they did along with them. This is one of my favorite films of all time.
Nanook of the North
Three years earlier, Robert Flaherty made what many consider the first film documentary, when he took his camera to northern Canada to film the lives of Inuk native, Nanook (“The Great Bear”) and his family.
It shows us how they lived and how they survived. Purists now complain that some of the shots were staged and that Nanook was an “actor” (although he was a genuine Inuk native. But the ideas of documentary right-mindedness didn’t exist in 1922, and there is a genuineness in Flaherty’s film that many more virtuous documentaries cannot equal.
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Number 10 on my list is actually a group of films. One thing that silent film did immeasurably well is horror. German filmmakers in the 1920s were immersed in an Expressionistic milieu that gave us films such as Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and The Golem and How He Came into the World. But Germany wasn’t the only place that worked out the magic of film images of the supernatural and spooky. Hollywood had its share, also.
Nosferatu
F.W. Murnau’s plagiarized version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula nearly was lost to history. Stoker’s estate sued over the film, which Murnau had not secured the rights to, and the court decided all copies of Nosferatu should be destroyed. Luckily, a copy survived and is now seen as one of the true masterpieces of silent film. All shadows and sharp angles, gothic castles and claw-like hands, it is a much spookier version of the story than 1931’s sound version with Bela Lugosi.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
With its Expressionist cityscapes, with nary a right angle to be seen, and with Conrad Veidt’s pasty-faced somnambulist, the film is an absolute feast of visual inventiveness. If you ever needed a picture of what insanity might look like from the inside, this film is it.
The Phantom of the Opera
All of the films I have discussed here are among the best made in the silent era. Phantom of the Opera, if seen merely as the result of film direction and writing, is rather ordinary. But its visuals are unforgettable. Lon Chaney’s skull-like make-up for the phantom, the Gothic underworld of the Paris Opera, and perhaps most of all, the Two-Strip Technicolor episode where the phantom descends the grand staircase of the opera house wearing the costume of the Mask of Red Death.
Visually stunning, if less than brilliantly told, the Phantom of the Opera is buried in the consciousness of its audiences. I doubt that the several remakes of the film or the eponymous musical would have ever existed if the original film hadn’t been so compelling.
This hasn’t been my list of the Top 10 (or 12) silent films. Such a list would have to include Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans; Greed; City Lights; The Big Parade; Pandora’s Box; The Last Laugh; Flesh and the Devil; Cabiria — and a host of other contenders. Nor are these just my favorite films. I have others among the silents, including The Lost World or Hell’s Hinges.
Nor have I listed any of the many silent short comedies — especially missing: the films of Chaplin, Arbuckle, Lloyd, Keaton, the Keystone Cops or Laurel and Hardy. They are familiar enough and require no special pleading from me.
But I have hoped to make the case for an entire era of cinema, and that it is its own artform, and not merely film manqué, waiting quietly to be perfected by Al Jolson.
Now that I am past-ripe and a wizened old man, what do I spend my time thinking about? Certainly not the things I thought, or cared about when I was in my 20s or even my 40s. Gone is any career ambition, or the delights of sex or ownership or the esteem of my peers.
I am not the same person I was when I was young. I can’t feel bad about who I was, or feel guilt about the stupid things I thought or did. That was then and cannot be changed. And one of the most important lessons I have grown into is the realization that I can effect very little change or improvement on the world. It will always be joyful and cruel, intelligent and mind-numbingly dumb, individual and collegial, important and inconsequential. I can attempt to reduce my contribution to the cruel, dumb and evil.
I think also the related thought that while I am an infinitesimal mote in the cosmic history, and count for absolutely nothing in the big picture, that so much of the world can fill me with afflatus and pleasure. And how much meaning such things afford me.
Beyond that, I think about the experience of being alive, in the sense of paying attention to the physical world around me. I don’t mean “mindfulness,” which is a repellent and trendy buzzword. To say, “being in the moment” is not quite it. The moment doesn’t much count, but what does is the fact of paying attention, and feeling a part of it all. Me and the universe, a single thing. My emotional connection is a silken thread in the weft of an immense fabric.
And so, I concern myself instead with whether I am a good person, whether I have atoned for the foolish, selfish or hurtful things I may have done or been in the past. Do I listen? Am I generous, especially in spontaneous fashion? Do I try to make others happy?
Then, I think of death. Not in any romanticized Sorrows of Young Werther way, but rather the recognition that extinction is within touching distance. Blankness, non-existence, evaporation. I never think that I have existence beyond the body that generates my consciousness. When I die, my spirit will not hover in some afterlife; rather, I will cease being created, moment by moment. Gone. This is not something I spend much time fearing, but rather a speculation I attempt in cool realization of fact.
Death is now always sitting on the front steps waiting for me to answer the door. And not only my own death. Not even principally my own.
I cannot avoid experiencing grief. I don’t mean sadness, but gut-hollowing grief and the universal experience of loss. There are two such experiences that humanity gets to share and the irony is that although it is common to all, to each it feels as if we are the only and first ever to feel it. Those two things are love and later, grief. It can be sympathized with, when someone you care about goes through it, but it cannot be shared. It is the most personal intimate thing I have ever been through. You may think that granite is real, but you don’t know real until you know grief.
These are all some of the things that occupy my brain throughout the day.
They are not all cosmic. Just as much a taker-up of my brain power, is language. How can it work? Why can I understand a thick Brooklyn accent and an Appalachian twang although the sounds they generate have little to do with each other? Why we think language corresponds to experience when it clearly refers primarily to itself. It is a parallel universe. Yet, we believe it describes reality. Why?
What does not much concern me is politics. I have my own beliefs, of course. And I vote. But as I wrote some 40 years ago, “Politics answers no question worth asking.” It may make life possible, but does not explain why we should live.
To be truly alive is to pay attention. Engagement. Being aware.
When I was a callow college student brilliant at giving a professor what he or she wanted, taking it all in, and giving it all back. But then, one of them shocked me awake by giving me a D grade for doing just that. He didn’t want me to give him what he wanted. Regurgitation isn’t learning. He wanted me to engage with the material, directly. Not words about the material. And he made me do actual work, no more coasting on cleverness. He prevented me from settling for glib. It was one of the most important lessons I ever got. “Engage with the subject.” I have been forever grateful for that. It has been my guiding principle.
A famous British comedian has reckoned, in a serious moment, that the most important human emotion is gratitude. He called it the “mother of all virtues.”
Others, like love or hate, may be more immediate in power, but love, for instance, is of little use without the recognition of it gained through gratitude. And as I look back over a long life, I feel gratitude for so much.
The first is an impersonal gratitude for the mere fact of the spark of consciousness between two infinite darknesses. And the awareness of that gives me not the unreflective “thanks for that,” but a deep and pervasive gratitude for just breathing, and being aware that I am breathing.
The fact that I was born in an unprecedented era — one of relative peace after two disastrous world wars, and an era of modern medicine, booming economy, wide education, increasing social justice (though far from perfect) — has not gone unnoticed. All are to be grateful for.
Other gratitude is more focused on people. Primarily I am grateful for the 35 years my late wife, Carole, was willing to share with me. She, and those years, made me who I became more than anything else — and I include the parents who raised me and the DNA that governed much of the happenstance of existence. No, she was most responsible. I cannot thank her enough and always feel unworthy of the love she offered me. She died seven years ago. I grieve for her every day.
I do, however, recognize what my parents gave me and wish I could, now that they are gone, share my gratitude with them. I cannot say they were exceptional parents, but they gave me a sense of security, a sense of fair-mindedness, of tolerance. And there was never any doubt from them that I would be college educated and set off on a successful life. I am grateful for the fact they never forced a religious orthodoxy on me. And that they made sure we traveled and saw a wider sense of life.
I once made a list of all the people I feel gratitude toward. It went on for pages. I can’t include them all here, and you wouldn’t know who they were, anyway. But they were important to me. You surely have your own cast of characters and your own gratefulness. None of us grows purely on our own.
And so, aiming into year 77, I can admit such a welling of gratitude that the thought of the non-being shortly ahead of me seems more like a fine rounding-off than a horrible cheat.
The Mona Lisa used to be a painting. Not any more. Now it’s a meme. Especially in the current climate of cellphones and online culture, the original has lost all relevance, and has been replaced by hundreds of refracted reflections.
For that matter, “meme” isn’t what it was, either. Now, a meme is pretty much anything that someone uploads — a picture with a clever caption; a funny picture; a political observation. If it gets noticed and reposted, either in its original form, or altered by the observer, it has become a meme. A meme is a cat hanging on to a clothesline or a quote from Mark Twain that he never actually said.
But that is not what I’m talking about here. A meme, as I’m using it, is its older meaning: a familiar image, saying, bit of music, or bit of art that has become so well known as to be instantly identifiable that it becomes a shorthand for whatever you wish it to be. The original needn’t be known for the meme to be understood. I’m sure there are people who believe the image of McCaulay Culkin holding the sides of his face in Home Alone is the original, not recognizing the reference to Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The original painting has receded and the pose itself is the referent.
Many of the most famous pieces of art have become memes: Grant Wood’s American Gothic; the Venus de Milo; Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. You don’t need to explain the joke when you use them. If I made a parody of, say, Ingres’ Portrait of Monsieur Bertin, with Rupert Murdoch’s face replacing Bertin’s, I’m pretty sure I’d have to explain what I meant. But Liberty on the Barricades needs no such support. We know.
It isn’t just pictures that become memes. One of the oldest, going back to the Roman era, was a glyph sometimes called the Sator Square, an arrangement of letters (words) that reads the same top to bottom and side to side and even backwards. It has been found from ancient times into the Middle Ages. Its exact meaning and purpose are not clear. It sort of translates as “Farmer Arepo works with wheels.” Sort of. And during World War II, the little cartoon, “Kilroy was here” showed up all over the place. Memes come in all sorts of forms.
Literature can do it, too. You don’t have to know any Shakespeare at all to recognize “To be, or not to be.” It’s there in the atmosphere. Not that we need to know much, or even know correctly.
Getting it wrong is hardly a hindrance. How many people hear, “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo,” and assume Juliet can’t find her beau? How many cartoons, comedy skits, movie bits are built from that misunderstanding? Where did Romeo go? “Wherefore” is simply too antique a term to be easily understood. And the following “Rose by any other name” is the sequent meme.
Even music can do this. “Da-da-da-DUMM” is known to those who have never, ever heard a symphony. It is a meme. The rest of Beethoven’s symphony might as well disappear.
And so it is with Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. It hardly matters who Lisa was, when it was painted, nor all that technical hoo-hah about the sfumato technique. The lady has transmigrated everywhere, known to everyone, pretty much around the world. Use her for whatever you wish. You can even mix memes.
In spending weeks immersed in the Mona Lisa, gathering what I needed for my previous blog entry on the painting, I found hundreds of memed parodies. Some too good to waste. And so, I wanted to post a followup with some of my favorite Mona Lisa knock-offs. (I just counted up the images I have collected, more than I could ever use, and discovered 443 jpegs. I get exhausted just thinking about it.)
The Mona Lisa is the subject of endless cartoons. Some make jokes about the famous smile
others to Leonardo himself…
The Mona Lisa can just be a stand-in for important art…
The New Yorker puts them on its cover…
In fact, lots of magazines have slapped our lady on their fronts.
Or made fun of her…
And she shows up on some magazines you might not expect…
That’s just a sampling. I got lots more, but we need to move on. Celebrities get the Mona Lisa treatment quite often.
Whoopie Goldberg, Marilyn Monroe, Taylor Swift
And that last one has had the treatment over and over. Whoda thunkit?
And you don’t have to be female…
Vin Diesel, Albert Einstein, Bill Murray
You can be a cartoon character…
Or a Disney character. They all run the the meme grinder…
And even more. Anyone remember Daria?
I found dozens of anime Mona Lisas…
Muppet Giocandas…
There are Mona Lisas with animals…
And with cats…
And Mona Lisas as animals…
And as cats…
She shows up frequently as graffiti…
And as Pop Art. How could she not?
Quite serious artists have used our lady as a model. The joke Mona Lisa by Marcel Duchamp, dating from 1919, gives her a mustache and the letters “LHOOQ,” which, pronounced in French sound the same as “Elle a chaud au cul,” or roughly, “She has a hot ass.”
By Robert Henri, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernando Botero
She comes in minimalist form, still easily identifiable…
And shows up on stamps, the side of a barn, and, of course, a port-a-potty…
And we’re just getting started with goofy. How about a balloon Mona Lisa, or reproduced on an Etch-a-Sketch or made out of Legos…
And if that isn’t enough, what about a Mona Lisa made from bacon; or a Mona Lisa Pizza; or one made from lentils…
Still further, one made from jelly beans. Or a pair of them in peanut butter and jelly.
Poet William Blake once wrote, “You never know what is enough until you know what is too much,” and you may very well feel we’ve long gone on too long with this. I get it. But even with all the images I’ve included, I have at least a hundred more that I’ve got left over, including Mona Lisa on coins…
And, suitable for a finale, a big pile of bones…
Originally, I planned to write a single blog entry about the Mona Lisa, but soon came to realize that if I were going to give any background information about the painting to explain all the memified hoopla, it would have to stretch into two halves. I’ve been going through and editing hundreds of images, and researching information about Leonardo and his art. I think I’m ready to give it a rest now for a while. I’m sure you are, too.
Is there a more over-hyped piece of art than the Mona Lisa? I don’t intend to demean Leonardo’s painting, but to question the PR. It’s an excellent painting, but I could name a hundred others as good or maybe better. Yet, this portrait of a middle-class Florentine woman is the most widely known painting in the world. At least, since 1911.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the prototype of the Renaissance Man. Initially a painter, he was also an inventor, scientist, sculptor and architect. But he was also a world-class procrastinator and leaver of unfinished works. His attention span could be intense, but often quite short.
He was born to an unmarried woman about 20 miles from Florence, Italy. His father was a local notary who married four times and sired at least 17 children, including our young Leo.
He studied painting as an assistant to Andrea del Verrocchio, but then made his living primarily as a military architect, working in turn for the Sforzas, the Medicis, and Borgias. In his spare time, he continued to take painting commissions (not all of which he ever finished) and working on various scientific and philosophic theories.
“Leonardo painting the Mona Lisa” by Cesare Maccari (1863) mistakenly has the left-handed artist painting right-handed
When he was 51, living back in Florence, he was commissioned to paint a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, who was married to Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo. She married him in 1495, when she was 15 years old, which meant she was about 23 when Leonardo began painting her. (I say “began” because the painter never really finished the painting and never delivered it to its commissioner; he never received payment for the commission, either).
The painting has long been known, outside of the English-speaking world, as La Gioconda, or “the Cheerful Woman,” but was also just the feminine version of her married name, Lisa del Giocondo.
“Lady with an Ermine;” “Ginevra de’ Benci;” La Ferronnière”
Leonardo seemed to enjoy including puns in his portraits. La Gioconda comes from the Latin “jocundus,” which means agreeable or pleasant. Hence the mild smile. In his three other portraits of women, he does something similar. The Lady with an Ermine includes the beast because the ermine was a symbol of the Sforza family, and also because the sitter’s surname, Cecilia Gallerani — mistress of Ludovico Sforza — is a play on the ancient Greek name for an ermine, galê (γαλῆ). The portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci sets the sitter among Juniper plants. “Ginevra” is Italian for Juniper. And finally, La Belle Ferronnière, is an early portrait of Lucretia Crivelli, who was married to an ironmonger (“ferronnier”) and mistress of Francis I of France. In her portrait, she is also wearing a decorative headstrap known as a “ferronniere.”
The better known title, Mona Lisa, is her name, Lisa, and the honorific “Mona,” which is a contraction of “Ma Donna,” or “My Lady.” In Italian, it is there usually spelled “Monna,” and the painting as Monna Lisa. (Never “Mona,” because in various Italian dialects that is a slang word for a woman’s lady parts, and used as an insult for a stupid or obstructionist person, much as the C-word is used in British English, where it doesn’t bear quite the taboo status it has in the U.S.)
Leonardo seems to have worked on the portrait until 1506 and put it aside for a bigger commission, a mural commemorating the Battle of Anghieri — a mural he never finished, either. He kept the painting through several moves and took it to France with him in 1516, where he began working for King Francis I, primarily as a military engineer. The king bought the Mona Lisa, probably in 1518, and it wandered around various palaces after that, until after the Revolution when it found its way to Napoleon’s bedroom and then to the Louvre.
“Mona Lisa” and what it might look like under the darkened varnish
Or, at least, that’s the most likely story. There is an alternative version, in which the painting, of an unknown sitter, was commissioned by Giuliano de Medici in 1513 and was later confused for the Giocondo painting that was mentioned by historian Giorgio Vasari.
The problem is complicated by the fact there are two Mona Lisas, both generally accepted as by Leonardo — a second one that was in the possession of Leonardo’s assistant (and likely lover) Andrea Salai and catalogued after Leonardo’s death in 1519.
Making matters worse, there are at least three Mona Lisas that experts agree were made in Leonardo’s studio, at the same time, with the extras likely painted by either Leonardo himself or his assistant Salai.
Prado “Mona Lisa” before and after restoration
One of the supernumeraries is at the Prado in Madrid. It was discovered when a portrait of a lady, with a black background was cleaned in 2012 and the background of the famous Mona Lisa was uncovered. The previously ignored painting was then studied more closely and found to have been painted in Leonardo’s studio at the same time as the more famous painting.
“Isleworth Mona Lisa” and Louvre version compared
Another version, hidden in a Swiss bank vault until 2012, is the so-called Isleworth Mona Lisa, which was first discovered in 1913 and held in private hands since then. Originally brought to England from Italy in the 1780s by a Somerset nobleman named James Marwood and listed in his collection as “La Jaconde.”
Examined by hordes of connoisseurs, experts, scientists and historians, it has been confirmed as a Leonardo original, as an obvious copy, as the first true Mona Lisa, as a later copy by Leonardo himself, or by one of his assistants, and maybe with a few corrective brushstrokes by the master himself. In other words, it has been argued over constantly and no true consensus has been arrived at.
It differs from the Louvre painting by having a different background landscape, being painted on canvas and not on poplar board, showing an obviously younger subject, and having columns on each side of the image.
It does date from the right era, all are agreed, and may have come from Leonardo’s atelier. Since there is further confusion over the date of the initial painting — either begun in 1503, as per Vasari, or in 1513, as per Louis d’Aragon — perhaps the Isleworth Mona Lisa was painted first and years later, the Louvre painting was made; or perhaps the other way around. Not to dive too deep into the weeds here, but X-rays of the Louvre painting show considerable work, changes of pose and features, while the Isleworth painting seems to show very little, suggesting that the Louvre painting came first, with all the hedging and shifting, and the Isleworth version was a confident copy. Perhaps. Who knows?
It was not unusual, for Leonardo, or any other painter at the time, to make more than one version of a painting, so it is possible that both were made by our hero. Perhaps. Who knows?
Top row, L-R: two 16th c. copies; 2 18th c. copies, 1 19th c. copy; bottom row: copies with columns, various eras
We do know that the painting was copied many times over the centuries. Some copies have the columns, others do not. A sketch made by Raphael in about 1505 shows the columns, but perhaps Raphael painted it from memory, or from hearing a description. It is not a very faithful copy, either way.
There are also a series of nude Mona Lisas, seeming to emanate from Leonardo’s studio, perhaps by his students. There are at least six of them. Their grasp of female bodies seems somewhat sketchy, so they may have not been painted from life, but imagined by students less familiar with actual women. (Michelangelo had a similar problem with female nudes, often making them look like male body builders with odd lumps of fat on their chests). In fact, there is some speculation that the subject was not Lisa del Giocondo, but Leonardo’s assistant and gay lover Salai, painted as a woman. Mona Lisa in drag? Perhaps. Who knows? These paintings are usually titled Mona Vanna.
It is the Louvre Mona Lisa that has become the de facto true one, and has been copied, discussed, parodied and referenced endlessly. It is a fairly standard Renaissance-era portrait pose, three-quarter length. There are four aspects of the painting that stand out.
First, the eyes, which are said to “follow you around the room,” as if that were some magical power. Any face painted or photographed with its subject looking directly out will have eyes that seem to look at you, no matter what angle you stand in front of it. There is no trick to that. But in addition, our lady has no eyebrows and no eyelashes. Many of the copies do, and Vasari describes her eyebrows particularly, and so it is assumed they used to be there, but were accidentally wiped off during some previous cleaning of the painting.
Then, there is the mouth and its ambiguous smile. The Mona Lisa smile has been subject of innumerable New Yorker cartoons, popular songs and magazine ads. A slight upturn at the corners of the lips, described only by a tiny gradation in shading. This has also been lauded as a special and unique quality of Leonardo’s genius. Of course, many other paintings of the time display nuanced expressions also.
And there are the hands, gently overlapping in a demure pose meant to signify breeding and chastity. Although one critic, making an argument for the Isleworth Mona Lisa as the original, complained that the hands of the Louvre painting are “thick and bloated.” The eyes of the beholder, I guess.
Salient features of “La Gioconda”
Finally, there is the landscape behind the sitter. It has never been satisfactorily identified as a real location, and, of course, it doesn’t have to be. Fantasy landscapes abound in art history. But one theory, which I have long agreed with, is that it isn’t meant to be a real piece of geography at all, but is a tapestry on the wall behind La Gioconda.
When Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa, oil painting was still relatively new to Italy. It had been common in northern Europe for at least a century, but most Italian painters stuck with egg tempera. Leonardo was one of several who picked up the new technique, which allowed a more graceful shading of tones and colors.
You can see the difference if you compare Botticelli’s Venus with Leonardo’s Gioconda. Edges are clean and distinct with tempera, but less so with oil, and the particular technique Leonardo used, called “sfumato,” or as he described it: “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke.”
It was shadows, he said, that build up volume and bring grace to faces. “The gracefulness of shadows, smoothly deprived of every sharp contour.”
In his studies of human perception, the scientist Leonardo had come to the conclusion that human vision is not the clear-edged thing that shows up in tempera, but something more soft-edged, and he sought to capture that in his work. There are few lines or edges in the Mona Lisa; it is mostly soft, in diffused light.
This is how important the Mona Lisa was at the Louvre in 1911
But back to 1911. I mentioned 1911 earlier. Before that year, the Mona Lisa was just one of a bunch of respected portraits of women in the Louvre. Most of them were Madonna and child paintings. Visitors to the museum were much more likely to line up to view the Venus de Milo or the barn-size expanse of Veronese’s Wedding at Cana (32 feet wide). Our Mona Lisa was just another frame among all others hanging on a gallery wall.
Then, on August 21, it wasn’t. Instead, there were four hooks where the painting had once been attached. The theft of the Mona Lisa became international news. Daring art theft!
The painter Louis Béroud had come to the museum that morning to paint a scene of the gallery, with its paintings, and reported to the guards that where the Mona Lisa should have been, there were only those hooks.
The guard assumed the painting had been removed by conservators to clean or photograph. But soon, when they went to check, it became apparent that the painting was gone. The museum was closed for a week while they searched high and low. No luck.
Vincenzo Peruggia mug shot
The painting was gone for more than two years. Turns out, it spent that time in the rented room of an Italian immigrant, hiding in a cupboard only two miles from the Louvre. Vincenzo Peruggia had been working as a glazier at the museum on and off, and felt, as an Italian patriot, he should return the patrimony of his native land. He grabbed the Mona Lisa primarily because his other targets were too large to smuggle out of the museum.
The police searched for the painting furiously, and many rumors abounded, leading to false leads.
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper reported how early interest was centered on Bordeaux, and indeed, Canadian newspaper the Ottawa Free Press on 26 August 1911 reported from Paris how “there appears to be no doubt here that Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous painting Mona Lisa, was taken to Bordeaux, whence it is feared it will be carried either to Spain or South America.” According to its account, a witness had seen a “stout man, carrying a large panel covered with a horse blanket, take the 7:47 express for Bordeaux on Monday morning,” soon after the Mona Lisa was taken.
Of course, that was fake news. But stories sold newspapers. One newspaper printed an “interview” with Mona Lisa. Another that fictional criminal Arsène Lupin must have done it. There were movies and popular songs about it. Over two years, hundreds of phony leads were sent to police.
Various people were arrested and released, including Pablo Picasso. Picasso, and his friend Guillaume Apollinaire had been dabbling in some minor fencing of stolen artwork. But they were soon cleared in the Mona Lisa heist.
French postcards: Where is she?
Actually, the painting didn’t leave Peruggia’s cupboard until he tried to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, where he was arrested and served seven months in prison — a short term, since, in Italy, he was considered a patriot.
But the Mona Lisa was not one of the many “appropriated” artworks that have found their way into various museums around the world. It was sold quite legally to the French king 400 years previous. By 1914, it was returned to the Louvre.
Today, the painting is safely protected behind bullet-proof glass and a barrier, so that the closest anyone can get to it is some 10 feet away, and that only if they are lucky, seeing as how the painting attracts an average of 30,000 visitors a day — about the size of the crowd at an average major league baseball game. People are not there to see the painting, so much, as to be able to say they have seen it. There is little chance to study the vaunted brush work or sfumato.
The protection is certainly warranted. In 1956, it was attacked with acid and also with a rock thrown at it. In 1974, it was red paint. In 2009, a coffee cup. In 2022, a man in drag in a wheelchair threw a cake at it. And on January 28 this year, two members of the Riposte Alimentaire (foot retaliation) sprayed pumpkin soup at it, demanding sustainable farming. What the Mona Lisa has to do with farming is anyone’s guess.
This year it was decided to create a special gallery just for the Mona Lisa, in the museum basement, and to charge a special admission fee, and run controlled groups past the painting, in an attempt to systematize the current chaos. Whether this happens or not, we’ll have to wait to see.
The Mona Lisa is no longer just one painting in the Louvre. It has morphed from a painting into a meme.
My Uncle Stanley had an ambition in life to own a Weimaraner hound. I was only a boy at the time and didn’t quite understand the appeal of such a dog, but for the IBM typewriter technician he was, living in New Jersey in the 1960s, I imagine it had something of the attraction a solid gold toilet had for Elvis Presley. The rest of us had dogs that we lucked into, finding a stray, or getting a mutt from the dog pound. But the Weimaraner was a pricey breed and my uncle wanted one. He finally got one. It was a nice dog, but for me, that’s just what it was — a dog.
Many, I think, have some similar focus in their lives, some object that signifies arrival, or a sense of completeness in life. Most items hold that position only for as long as they are unachieved. Yet there remains a pride in the achievement, even if the reward is rather less than anticipated.
I think of those who have yearned to own a Cadillac. They may live in a mobile home and work as janitor in the local factory, but if they can park a Caddy out front, it will show they aren’t complete failures.
As in the familiar song, St. James Infirmary: When I die, “Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain,/ So the boys’ll know that I died standin’ pat.”
The idea of getting that bit you believe you want or need is common. Perhaps it is a $300 Wüsthof chef knife; or a Rolex watch; or a bespoke suit from Hong Kong. Whatever is your icon of either quality or status or style, it chases you through life until you can finally afford it. I certainly have felt it. When I was young, it was a Nikon camera, then a Leica and then a Hasselblad. I finally got each and while I wasn’t disappointed — they are all as good as their reputations — they never quite made that great a difference in the photographs I made.
I imagine that if the People’s Republic of China ever finally get their hands on Taiwan, it will not prove to be quite so satisfying a triumph as they had imagined.
I never chased a particular car or watch, but there are books I longed for. I have managed to get some of them; others still elude me. But here are the big three I lusted after for years.
The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World
Beginning in the third grade, I loved maps. And what I loved more than any were the big maps in the classroom that were pulled down like a windowshade, and were richly colored in thick inks — not halftone dots: The green was dark green ink, not a mix of yellow and cyan dots. Mountain regions were a rich chestnut brown. Those maps were beautiful. They may have been out of date even in my childhood, but I didn’t love them for their accuracy, but as art.
Years later, I found something very similar in older editions of the Goode’s School Atlas, where the maps were created using wood engravings, so there were straight-line cross-hatchings for shadings, and again, multi-colored inks for the printing. I saw them as art books. I found a few in old, musty used book stores and I still treasure them.
The very first puzzle pieces I remember, as far back as infancy, were map puzzles, where each U.S. state was a single piece. I took apart and redid that states puzzle hundreds of times, even as, in my infant-tongue the states were Uncle Homer and Miss Thompson.
Later, as a young man, newly empowered with a car and an income, I began traveling, and to aid that travel, I had a Rand McNally Road Atlas. I have updated them every other year or so, but I also acquired vintage versions from 1935 and 1942, which are things of beauty of their own, in two-color printing, with most roads in dark blue and highways in red. I treasure the old ones, while the newer, full-color maps are merely disposable useful tools.
But, out there on the horizon, was the Times Comprehensive Atlas of The World, published in constantly updated editions from 1895 through its 16th edition in 2023. By 1959, the Midcentury Edition of the atlas was a five-volume elephant folio edition measuring 12-by-19-inches. It was the Cadillac of world atlases and it was way out of my price range when I was young. I did manage to get the single volume 10th edition, picked up used.
It was a large, handsome volume. The maps were halftones, so, not as esthetically distinct as the Goode’s, but still, it was by all counts the best atlas on the market. Unfortunately, when I retired, I had to sell off about 75 percent of my library to make the move across the country from Phoenix to North Carolina, and the Times atlas was one of the casualties. Kept the Goode’s, though.
The Encyclopedia Brittanica
By the time I was in sixth grade, I wanted to learn everything. I was young enough still to think that possible. And where would I find all this knowledge? I’d read the encyclopedia.
My neighbors had an old Compton’s Picture Encyclopedia, from the 1930s, which they gave us, and I read it over and over, with its streamlined steam trains, autogyros and biplanes. But even as a kid, I knew the books were out of date. A wonderful long entry on “The Great War,” but, although I was reading it in 1953 or so, less than 10 years after WWII, there was no mention of any of it.
My mother wanted to help, and so, she began buying the promotional supermarket offering Funk and Wagnalls, one per week, for 99 cents each, until we had the full set, cheaply printed and bound. I used them for years to write theme papers for school. But I always knew that they weren’t the “real thing.” For that I needed the Britannica, which was way outside my family’s budget.
I continued lusting for my own Encyclopedia Britannica, all through college, the jobs that followed and into my years at the newspaper in Arizona, when I finally got a set at Bookman’s, a used book store in Mesa. But my enthusiasm was tempered by the fact that the set I got was not the traditional Britannica, but the combined “micropædia” and “macropædia,” in which the entries were divided into the more popular entries, in shorter, easier to read versions — the micropædia — and the more in-depth entries in the rest of the volumes. It felt like a dumbed-down, even trendy version of what I truly wanted. I wanted the Belmondo Breathless and got the Richard Gere Breathless.
Years later, I came across the revised 14th edition, in 24 volumes and its leathery maroon covers and thistle logo, and managed to buy it. This was the real thing, at last. The pride of my collection.
At Bookman’s, I later also found a facsimile version of the original three-volume Encyclopædia Britannica, from 1768. The replica was quite convincing, even including (imitation) foxing on some of the pages. More interesting was evidence that the 18th century project engaged the enthusiasm of its makers early on, and then rather petered out. The first volume covers the letters “A” and “B.” The second includes “C” through “L.” And the third and slimmest volume gets to cover everything else to the letter “Zed.” The facsimile edition was published in 1971.
Then, of course, the internet came along, with its Wikipedia. The Britannica sat on the shelf as a kind of trophy, but largely unused. And when we moved, it was one of the casualties. So long in the getting, so short in the forgetting.
The Oxford English Dictionary
But the real prize, the one thing that I lusted for more than any other, was the Oxford English Dictionary, the 20 volume final word on the English language.
I was a long-time reader of dictionaries. From second-grade on, I loved learning vocabulary. From 8th grade on, I loved learning the etymologies of words, and how they could change meaning over time. The OED contained all that information. Entries were long, involved and gave dozens, maybe scores, of citations, each dated and quoted. A simple word with multiple meanings, such as “set,” went on for pages, and required 60,000 words to describe some 580 senses. The whole of the dictionary was 21,730 pages and 59 million words covering more than 300,000 entries. It was heaven. It was also pricey. The set could sell from $1500 to $2000, depending on where you bought it.
The full OED is still my unicorn. I have never found an affordable used set. But, in the 1970s, the Oxford Press put out a 2-volume Compact Edition, with every four pages of the original OED shrunk photomechanically down to quarter-size and printed four original pages squeezed into each single page of the edition, which required the use of a magnifying glass (included) to be able to read it. The Compact Edition was offered at rock-bottom price as a promotion through a book club, and I signed on, and got my copy.
It is very hard to read, even with the magnifying glass, and the volumes were big and bulky and uncomfortable to use, but at least I owned a version of the OED. This was as close as I got to Nirvana.
I still have the Compact Edition, occupying the upper shelf of a coat closet. I haven’t dragged it out in years, but I still have it, a reminder of those things I once thought would change my life forever. Perhaps they did.
So, what did you always want and did or didn’t finally achieve?
Richard Nilsen 