Category: Living

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.

Continue reading “Merit”

It’s been interesting over the past year or so to keep track of what’s going on in Hong Kong. I’ve only been to the Special Administrative Region a few times, and I missed out on going there pre-handover, which will forever haunt me as a regret. The Chinese government has been slowly tightening the screws on local rule, despite – or more likely because of – its agreement during the handover to respect local essentially English law traditions for the first fifty years of post-colonial rule. That’s kind of a powerful slap in the face for a large and lets face it imperial nation like China; once sufficient time had passed, and once it was obviously there was nothing a diminishing second class power like the United Kingdom could really do about it other than marshall “world opinion”, that clause would be ignored. And so it has been: the Communist central government in Beijing has essentially passed a set of laws which eliminate any pretense of “one country, two systems” with respect to the HKSAR. It’s officially one country, one system.

Continue reading “Power failure”

The inspiration to write hasn’t quite been here lately, as Americans – and probably North Americans more broadly – have been in a kind of limbo, waiting to see how the election will turn out. I’ve been actually a bit blown away at how Matt has been developing The Deckle Edge into an amazing multimedia platform, and how Mark has been expanding on the themes of identity and translation, while in the background I’ve been caught up trying to find a couple cords of firewood for the winter and keeping the boy focused on learning.

Continue reading “Socks and sandals”

We walked together through the Olympic Park in east London, about a month ago, on a bright October morning, talking, as we often do, about the books we had recently read.   In my case, Another Country, a James Baldwin novel from the early 1960s which I had greatly enjoyed.  In his case the plays of Bertolt Brecht.  He was also reading some secondary literature on the German author and he mentioned that some critics consider Brecht’s best work to be his poetry.  Like many people who read only in English, I think of him primarily as a dramatist, one of the best from the previous century.  However, our conversation prompted me to recall a review of the new English translation of his Collected Poems, which came out a couple of years ago, which stressed the centrality of poetry to his oeuvre.  At well over one thousand pages, it is an intimidatingly large body of work, which I have yet to engage with, although I know that I have a shorter selection of his poems on one of my many bookshelves, awaiting my attention. 

Continue reading “Translating myself”

We are being encouraged – in some cases, instructed – to maintain social distance.   In London, this currently means: wash your hands regularly, wear a mask in shops, and try to keep at least two metres away from others, unless they are part of your household group, which is limited to six people.  The rules change frequently and somewhat arbitrarily, depending on whether the government feels a greater need to assuage its libertarian or paternalist critics.  The population response varies according to temperament, tolerance for risk, propensity to follow rules, and the extent to which paid work necessitates direct rather then mediated contact with others.  Some have made radical changes to their patterns of work, travel, family life, and social interactions, while others have hardly changed their lifestyles at all.  

Continue reading “Social distancing”