Category: Living

With apologies to Abraham Maslow, I suggest our primary needs as 21^st century human beings living in developed countries center around food and water, rest, shelter, and physical connection with others. Each of these needs can be fulfilled in basic, transactional ways, but can also be achieved in transcendent moments, allowing the bottom level of Maslow’s pyramid to leap upwards…self-actualization attained through the fulfillment of basic needs.

Today was Thanksgiving in America (or actually it was yesterday – I’m writing this somewhat late). I took my son over to my parents’ house and we had a proper feast. I was responsible for the turkey, and I made it with an old fashioned oyster stuffing, and I don’t think I’m being immodest in saying that it was spectacular. I also made sausage dressing and brussell sprouts. My mom made what she calls “holiday potatoes” – which are mashed potatoes with a ratio of potato to cream and butter of roughly 1:1, similar to Joel Robuchon’s potatoes but she adds minced onions and it’s far better, since I’ve had the chance to have Chef Joel’s potatoes in a past life courtesy of investment banking expense accounts – and she also made glazed carrots, also spectacular, and candied sweet potatoes, which are so candied I can’t even try to taste them. Oh, and together we made about a half gallon of turkey gravy, which will clog our veins for the foreseeable future.

I was texting with a friend yesterday about the dumpster fire which is the end days of the Trump presidency.  He’s Canadian, one of the people whom I’ve desperately missed in the last year as the likelihood of an end to the border shutdown continues to recede into the mists of the future, so his perspective is a little different – but he’s an Albertan.  Keeping in mind that Alberta is the Texas of Canada, that means he leans a bit to the right in his politics.  That’s like saying San Antonio leans a little left in the political spectrum of Texas, though: just like even the Democrats in San Antonio carry concealed sidearms, the Tories in Alberta still love the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Last month, when it was possible to visit art galleries in London, I spent an hour looking at paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi at the National Gallery.  Despite her reputation in her lifetime as the greatest woman artist of her age – she was born in 1593 and died around 1654 – and, since we never qualify our judgments of male artists in that way, let me say more correctly that she was one of the greatest artists of her age, nonetheless this is the first exhibition devoted to her work in the United Kingdom.  She managed her own career and reputation, living and working at various times in Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, and London, mixing with interesting people, securing important patronage, and making a significant number of impressive paintings.  This, after surviving the trauma and humiliation of being raped in her late teens by an associate of her father’s, who was later found guilty at trial and exiled.  She was, then, a person who overcame an early crisis, to flourish in her chosen career at a time when the achievement of personal independence and professional success were rare for women.  She did not allow the disadvantages imposed on her by others to deflect her determination to succeed.  Her life is an exemplary case of well-earned success, even if it has taken 350 years for the management of Britain’s art galleries to take due notice. 

The neglect of Artemisia’s achievement, by other artists, scholars, critics, and gallery-goers, is hardly unique.  There are many women whose work has been ignored, trivialised, excluded from the museums and auction houses, despite its evident qualities.  A year ago, the Barbican Centre held an exhibition of work by the American artist Lee Krasner, only her second solo show in London (the first, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1965), demonstrating that abstract expressionism was never solely a male preoccupation, despite the fact that both public and private collections continue to prioritise work by Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning over work of comparable quality by Krasner, Frankenthaler, and Mitchell.   One of Krasner’s teachers, Hans Hofmann, once said of her work, “this is so good you would not know it was painted by a woman.”  Under a certain view of the world, this might count as a compliment.  Alternatively, it reflects the impoverished and uneducated character of the standard male gaze.