The New Criterion

THE NEW CRITERION’S PRECIS FOR MARCH, 2003:

While we at The New Criterion always seek to offer you a broad range of essays on culture, politics, and the arts, it often happens--by accident, it seems--that certain leitmotifs appear throughout a single issue. Quite different articles by different authors will "rhyme" with each other, senendipitously dwelling on certain themes or figures. The March number of the magazine is one occasion where we focus on a single period that has long fascinated us.

Something remarkable happened in the years surrounding 1900. Part Symbolist and part spiritualist, the arts (for a time) followed a path that remains to this day mysterious, inviting, and largely unknown. With the overtones of Mallarm� and Debussy, this month The New Criterion take on some of the major artists of the age with essays on Paul Val�ry and Marsden Hartley at one end, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso at the other. Roger Kimball begins with an appraisal of the painter Eduard Vuillard, now enjoying a major revival in a new exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington. (For details on how to download an advance PDF of this article, "Vuillard’s mysteries" see below.) We hope you will join us in enjoying this rich number.

CONTENTS:

* "Notes & Comments" (page 1). "Squeals from the nursery" on the bad behavior of bad-boy poets; "If they holler . . . " on the latest lawsuit over a treacherous nursery rhyme; "Oleo olio" on the oleaginous artist Matthew Barney at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

* "Vuillard’s mysteries" (page 5). Roger Kimball looks into the depth of this enigmatic painter:

"We come to Vuillard as we come to his pictures, askew, missing part of the plot. His pictures tend to occupy that capacious, half-lit storeroom of feeling where pre-eminence is guaranteed more by affection than by dispassionate evaluation. They are part of the family: somehow OUR family, once-removed."

(We have placed an advance, full-text PDF file of Roger Kimball’s article at a special address on our website. We invite you to download it now [420K-case sensitive]: http://www.newcriterion.com/vuillard.pdf)

* "RABBIT-PROOF FENCE: a ’true story’?" (page 12): Keith Windschuttle tracks down the holes in Phillip Noyce’s current film RABBIT-PROOF FENCE.

"RABBIT-PROOF FENCE is ostensibly an adventure story of female bravery and ingenuity in which three Aboriginal girls escape from an oppressive institution in Western Australia and make a fifteen-hundred-mile journey back to their home. In reality it is a work every bit as politically committed as Graham Greene’s. If anything, the anti-Australianism of the latter film outdoes the anti-Americanism of THE QUIET AMERICAN."

* "The intimate abstraction of Paul Val�ry" (page 17). Upon the publication of an English-language version of Val�ry’s CAHIERS/NOTEBOOKS, Joseph Epstein praises the late Symbolist’s evanescent touch.

"The name Paul Val�ry carries its own music. For those who know something of what lies behind it, the music deepens, is suggestive, and always richly complex. ’Complex,’ said Ravel, about his own artistic aims, ’never complicated.’) To know Val�ry only from his melodious but difficult poems--’Le Cimitiere marin,’ ’La Jeune Parque,’ and others--turns out to be to know him scarcely at all."

* "Peter Taylor today" (page 26). Upon the publication of two critical works, Richard Tillinghast weigh the achievement of this twentieth century novelist.

"The territory Peter Taylor staked out for himself may be summed up easily and neatly enough. His characters are primarily upper-middle-class and upper-class people from the upper, as opposed to the ’deep,’ south, living in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Just as William Faulkner made the state of Mississippi his theater of conflict and revelation, Peter Taylor focused on Tennessee, with its three distinct regions: west, middle, and east. Taylor had roots in all three provinces and in his writings the state becomes a ’paysage moralis.’"

* New poems by Andrew Frisardi & Justine Cook (page 33).

* "London journal: A tale of two Tonies" (page 36). John Gross takes little comfort in the difficulties facing Tony Blair, from his international policy for the war against Iraq, to internal problems including immigration, trade unions, and the soft economy.

* Theater: "Aging youth & a meatless sandwich" (page 39). Mark Steyn reviews "Kimberly Akimbo" at the Manhattan Theatre Club and "Shanghai Moon," produced by the Drama Dept. at the Greenwich House theater.

* Art: Karen Wilkin reports ringside from the "Matisse Picasso" bout at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (page 44):

"The show is essentially an expansion of that tantalizing epilogue to the Matisse retrospective--the core of the exhibition is once again the pairing of LES DEMOUSELLES and BATHERS WITH A TURTLE--extended to span the period between the two young artists’ initial awareness of each other’s work, in the first years of the twentieth century, and 1954, the year of Matisse’s death."

* Art: James Panero goes native at the Marsden Hartley survey in Hartford, Connecticut (page 49):

" No painter has come to embody better the brooding vigor and new, native spirit of American modernism at the turn of the century as Marsden Hartley (1877-1943). In mind as well as action and body, the painter from Lewiston, Maine, a woebegone member of the Stieglitz 291 circle, came to epitomize the dark mysteries and contradictions of his literary antecedents: . . . Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe."

* Music: "New York Chronicle" (page 53). In another busy month Jay Nordlinger reviews the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and several talented artists: the British soprano Jane Eaglen and the pianists Arcadi Volodos, Radu Lupu, and Garrick Ohlsson. He also enjoys a rare tenor recital and takes two trips to the Met for a new production of Janacek’s JENUFA and Mozart’s "Turkish" opera THE ABDUCTION FROM THE SERAGLIO.

Opera note: Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes! James F. Penrose fears Greeks even bearing gifts at Berlioz’s LES TROYENS at the Met (page 57).

* The media: "Himalayan self-righteousness" (page 59). James Bowman laments the smugness of the media, the protesters, and the poets in opposing the war against Iraq.

* Books: Peter Wood DIVERSITY: THE INVENTION OF A CONCEPT reviewed by John Derbyshire (page 64);

--Hermann Kurzke THOMAS MANN: LIFE AS A WORK OF ART: A BIOGRAPHY reviewed by Jeffrey Meyers (page 68);

--Doris Lessing THE SWEETEST DREAM reviewed by Paul Hollander (page 71);

--Christie Davies THE MIRTH OF NATIONS reviewed by Kenneth Minogue (page 74).

* Notebook: "Cliquez ici for Alexandria" (page 77). Theodore Dalrymple explores Alexandria’s library and the city itself, hometown of Cavafy.

FORTHCOMING IN THE NEW CRITERION:

In April, a very special section on poetry, including essays by David Barber, Dick Davis, Adam Kirsch, Eric Ormsby, & David Yezzi; The achievement of Stephan George, by John Simon; The Peloponnesian war, by Victor Davis Hanson; Simon Raven, by Brooke Allen; The vocal recital today, by Patrick J. Smith; Theodore Dreiser by Jeffrey Hart.

NEWS:

* "Art in The New Criterion" from our December issue is now available in a special 36-page reprint. Copies of this important re-publication may be purchased directly through the website for $3 (+$2 S+H). Follow this link for an order form:

http://www.newcriterion.com/constant/art.htm

* TNC AUDIO: On December 9, 2002, Hilton Kramer delivered a speech in New York on his career as an art critic. The speech was recorded on audio track. This is a reminder that we are now giving our supporters and recipients of The New Criterion mailing list an exclusive chance to listen to ten clips from this talk. We have placed a special audio start page at a non-public address on our website. The address is:

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/audio/audio.htm

We invite you to open this start page. Please bear in mind that due to the size of the audio files, a high-speed internet connection is recommended. Files are offered in Windows Media format (.wav). On the start page, we include information on how to download the free Windows Media player to your computer.

* A thank you to everyone who has contributed already to The New Criterion annual fundraising drive. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, The New Criterion relies on your extra support to publish each month. If you have yet to receive our fundraising letter, please email us at office@newcriterion.com.

* The Editors of The New Criterion are pleased to announce that Charles Tomlinson is the winner of the third annual New Criterion Poetry Prize. His book SKY-WRITING AND OTHER POEMS will be published by Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, in the fall of 2003.

* For a free digital look at portions of the March issue, please do not forget to visit the website at http://www.newcriterion.com. The issue will post on the first of the month.