September 2009 | Seeing Things

Often the visual arts will make a dance fan feel he or she is in the presence of dancing that doesn’t move through space and time, but is dancing nonetheless, or at least its cousin. The actual dance pickings seemed slim this year, as summer slid into autumn. This is often the case, but never fear; we’re already beginning to be bombarded with choices. Still I thought I’d grant myself a busman’s holiday and see what the picture people were up to. The ambitious exhibitions at the grandest museums have long runs, so shows that I missed during this spring/summer’s hectic dance season are still up. The permanent collections of such museums remain more or less permanent, though the big museums can never display all they own at one time. For this piece, I treated myself to four offerings currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Vermeer

Vermeer’s renowned work The Milkmaid, on loan from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, is the centerpiece of a special exhibition that runs through November 29. It’s joined by the Met’s own five Vermeers and other works, sometimes borrowed, related to it through the time, locale, and subject matter of their composition. The juxtaposition teaches a tough, true lesson about every art: competence enhanced by energy differs radically from sheer genius. None of his Netherlandish contemporaries in the seventeenth century holds a candle to Vermeer.
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Johannes Vermeer: The Milkmaid

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Painted in the late 1650s, The Milkmaid shows a robust young woman who, from her rough clothes with their rolled-up work sleeves, her setting, and her action–standing at a table heaped with various magnificently crusty breads, carefully pouring milk from an unglazed clay jug into a low glazed bowl of the same material–is clearly a domestic servant. The simple room she stands in holds little but the woman, the breads–some roughly torn into pieces for the bread porridge she’s probably concocting–and a few culinary objects.

Two elements, however, suggest an additional dimension: a small foot warmer behind her (imagine the heat creeping upwards when it’s used) and a sketch of Cupid shooting an arrow from his bow among the Delft tiles set where the chalky wall behind her meets the floor. An art aficionado of the time would easily have recognized these as emblems of erotic love. Today the ordinary viewer may not notice them or think of their meaning, but surely, if he simply looks hard and steadily at the woman herself, he will suspect, from what Vermeer shows him, that she has a secret inner life, which lures him into contemplating what it might be. The very light in the room–coming only faintly from the window to her left, which contains a small broken panel (can it possibly suggest lost virginity?), while she and her work are bathed in a cool glow from an invisible source to her right–gives an uncanny luminousness and mystery to this sturdy woman.

In this, and in nearly all the pictures of his maturity, Vermeer shows himself to be the master of the beauty of silence, composure, and introspection. As in sublime adagio dancing, his pictures create an atmosphere of suspended breath. And as in most long-lasting ballets, a sense of a profound yet unspecified inner life, subtle and elusive, is exuded by Vermeer’s solo figures. Even his couples and somewhat larger groups intimate–in addition to their social relationships (lovers or seducers and the women they desire; mistress and maid)–something of each figure’s half-hidden self.

Like dancing–even when it’s abstract–Vermeer’s paintings are an instructive and poignant example of expression without words, without even specificity. They are examples of the enigmas that give the greatest art its soul.

Robert Frank

The justly celebrated photographer Robert Frank (1924 – ) focuses on the unvarnished truth about ordinary people, a subject explored in the early works of choreographers like Trisha Brown (in her early, bare-boned “task dances”) and Mark Morris (in the motley types of his first dancers’ bodies and his combining pedestrian moves with codified technique). Compellingly, Frank reveals his have-not subjects as they are, stripped of the appearance or behavior more privileged people use as a mask, attempting to present themselves to the world as they would like to be seen.
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Robert Frank: Funeral–St. Helena, South Carolina

Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans

The Met’s current exhibition of his work, “Looking In: Robert Frank: The Americans” centers on the book of that name published a half- century ago, showing each of its 83 subtly riveting images with a generous addition of related material. The Swiss-born photographer, who emigrated to the States in 1947, drove a used Ford along a route that crossed the country twice in the mid-Fifties, shooting a vernacular America. He greatest sympathy seems to lie with the poor and with African-Americans–people with little power, financial, social, or political, so that their status ranges from the utterly ordinary to one that can’t help arousing the viewer’s pity. If these pictures are harsh, it’s because life is harsh, and often lonely, though the images include gaiety and human bonding as well as pathos.

Rich folks, the ruling classes, are naked in their pretensions in Frank’s images. But this photographer doesn’t preach, at least not openly; he records. Quoted in the show’s wall text, he says: “I am always looking outside, trying to look inside, trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there.” It’s reality he’s after. He grabbed it using a casual style that allowed low light, blurry focus, grainy images, and unconventional composition, according to Frank’s wishes and situation. This iconoclastic aesthetic had a major influence on photographers who came after him. And surely any dancer-choreographer who attempts to start building a vocabulary and a pattern for dance-making from scratch–Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham in her early career, Laura Dean–flouting traditional rules in pursuit of her or his own vision, is Frank’s kindred soul.

Watteau

If Frank’s work is rooted in life’s reality, the paintings and drawings of Antoine Watteau, which dominated French art in the first quarter of the 18th century, present (or, more accurately, imagine) life as artifice.

Antoine Watteau: Mezzetin

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

In the Met’s current “Watteau, Music, and Theatre,” the elegance and poise of the body’s poses and the figures’ consciously graceful self-presentation (exuding charm tempered by a regretful melancholy); the soft titillation of an erotic subtext; and the evocation of Cythera, the Greek island considered Venus’s birthplace, thus an idyllic land of pleasant dreams, are seen in musical and theatrical settings. One can readily think of them rendered in a ballet–The Sleeping Beauty being the most obvious–or compare them to delicate, fragile porcelain figurines.

As a dance writer I can’t fail to mention the well-known picture by Nicholas Lancret (a follower of Watteau, though without his emotional power), which is included in the exhibition. It features the celebrated ballerina Marie Camargo in a garlanded skirt whose hemline she raised slightly above prevailing tradition so that the viewer might see her trim ankles in action. Nevertheless it’s another work in the show, a Watteau brimming with atmosphere, that continues to seize my imagination and refuses to let it go. Called Mezzetin, (after the commedia dell’arte character), it shows a seated man past his first youth playing a lute in front of what seems to be a theatrical drop curtain hazily depicting a generic leafy park sheltering the obligatory marble statue.

Perhaps this man once trained as a dancer; his exquisitely muscled lower legs are sheathed in silver stockings that emphasize their admirable form. Lavish fabric–of lush texture and an intense rose hue–dominates his costume, from his generous hat and cape to the outsize rosettes on his shoes. By contrast, his hands, fingering his musical instrument, are grotesque–even deformed–reddened and gnarled as if to represent the result of the life-long practice necessary to a musician or dancer who aspires to the rank of artist. The backward tilt of his body, especially his head, and his faraway gaze suggest a haunting nostalgia for beauty that must vanish–in art and in love–and self-indulgence in that gentle, bittersweet melancholy as well. Forget The Sleeping Beauty; think, instead, of Balanchine’s Emeralds.
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Degas

It’s easy enough to call upon Degas to illustrate the connection between the visual arts and dancing, since dance was one of his primary subjects. But in the Met’s several rooms of this artist’s dance works, part of the museum’s permanent collection, we meet with the several aspects of Degas that exist. There are the pictures–in oils, pastel, or charcoal–of the female Paris Opéra dancers in performance; the studies of these dancers in rehearsal (notice their frequent boredom), in class (where they often stray from classical correctness), or at rest (where their exhaustion affects us viscerally); the bronze casts of small wax figures showing some of the oddest postures dancers assume, often while doing no more than examining the sole of their foot; and the drawings, often studies for work yet to be realized, Nearly all of these tell us that, at heart, Degas was not an artist of the pretty–as collections of reproductions on note cards often insist–but, at his truest, exercised the ruthless pair of eyes and deft hand of an anatomist. My favorite image in this last category–it burned itself into my brain long ago, though I can’t recall where I saw it–is a charcoal on, I think, blue paper, of an ankle and foot, in a soft ballet slipper. The foot is turned out and seen from behind. It is absolutely accurate, so the position seems very strange, especially as it’s unattached to a body that would give it a context. It is a perfect emblem of ballet.

On my Met visit I cottoned most to the over-familiar bronze figure of a child dancer (one Marie van Goethem) who was a student–one of the “little rats”–at the Paris Opéra. Strangely, the nearly life-size figure (first created in wax ca. 1880; cast in 1922) is adorned with some fabric: she wears a ragged-edged dancing skirt of coarse weave ending just above the knee, while the bronze braid that falls down her back is tied with a long-streamered bow of faded pink satin ribbon. Her right leg is thrust forward, as in fourth position, but it’s loose-kneed and takes no weight, as if she were “at ease,” between the more strenuous efforts of her trade. Her arms are pulled straight behind her back, hands clasped, the pose emphasizing her touching slenderness. The most eloquent part of her is her head, tilted defiantly upward with unquenchable pride.

She made me think of the little girls of the New York City Ballet’s academy, the School of American Ballet, each with her pluck, her self-assertion, and her desire to have the world understand she is a member of the elite and that though she may be a mere–oh, let’s say–advanced-beginner in her exotic trade, she has at least been selected as worthy of training, and her aspirations are sky high.

My father was a doctor, a general practitioner–G.P.–as his type was called back then when it was very common. Regular patients called him “Dr. Bill,” instinctively combining honorific with nickname to indicate their respect and affection. At the age of 12 he had emigrated from Russia to the States with his mother and siblings, his father having preceded them. His name is listed in the archives at the Ellis Island Museum: “William S. Bernstein, Russian (Jewish).”

His first job in America was driving a laundry truck. Needless to say, he was rapidly learning English and simultaneously attending school. His formidable mother commandeered the notion that the Jews were “the people of the book” and gave the claim her own interpretation. (Originally, “the book” meant only sacred texts.) But my grandmother, as practical as she was pious, knew that a successful formal education was essential to making one’s way up the ladder economically and socially. Her husband fully, and sternly, agreed. With rueful amusement, my dad told the tale of going to his father to announce with delight that he had received the grade of 98 percent on an important math test, only to receive the reply “And what happened to the other two percent?”

In due course, my father earned an undergraduate degree at Cornell University, a medical degree from Long Island College Hospital, and hung out his shingle. From the time of my earliest recollections, his office and our family living quarters were under the same roof in a workaday Brooklyn neighborhood. He made house calls, even in the middle of the night if the situation required it, and if the poorer people who consulted him couldn’t afford even his modest fees, he didn’t charge them.

Though he may not have been a specialist, like a surgeon, he had a specialty: He was a crackerjack diagnostician. Example: Our local friends tended to congregate casually on our front porch. My parents and I were sitting there one afternoon with a bunch of them when Herbie Bass strolled by. A sturdily built fellow in his mid-twenties, he was the son of a woman in my mother’s mahjong group. Flashing his splendid smile, he stopped to say hello, but didn’t take the seat offered him, making it clear that he was about to move on to a more exciting scene. My father, with his keen analytic eye, didn’t waste a moment on small talk or even on a “How are you?” “Come with me,” he commanded Herbie, hailed a cab, half dragged the astonished young man into it, and away they drove, at law-breaking speed. Later that day we found out that my father had sensed that Herbie was bleeding internally from an ulcer. Any delay and he might have been dead. Instead, thanks to my father, he lived, and eventually–irresistible smile flashing, olive skin glowing, hazel eyes glinting–married the girl he was no doubt on his way to see that fateful day. Or so I like to believe.

Shortly afterward, Carl Feldman, a self-effacing man who lived down the street in a shabby house, was diagnosed with a cancer rushing toward its terminal stage, and my father had a long talk in our living room with Carl’s lovely wife, Jeannette. (Faint southern accent, jet hair, dark wondering eyes, and skin like that of a peach, with a velvety texture and a pink tint at the cheekbones.) Her looks were so delicate, her manner so gentle, it seemed criminal to tell her the terrible truth of the situation. But my father did, within my hearing, as it happened. (Patients and their dear ones never objected to my presence, even in the consulting room. I must have seemed so young and innocent as to be invisible or uncomprehending.)

My father told Jeannette about her husband’s prognosis as sympathetically as could be possible under the dire circumstances. And he adhered to it, insisted upon it unwaveringly–science was science and hopeful lies were anathema–during a miraculous six-month remission, in which Carl would sit on a bench in front of his home every afternoon, playing in the sun with his two beautiful little daughters, replicas of their mother, if more lively.

When Carl finally died, my father didn’t attend the funeral, as a devoted family doctor in that time and place would be likely to do. My father didn’t go to funerals; he couldn’t bear to. He was an assiduous servant of Life, enemy of Death, and did not lend himself to Death’s pageants. He told me once that he had been spurred to become a doctor after watching a half dozen of his siblings die in infancy from diphtheria in the Old Country.

Of course eventually he had to go to his own mother’s funeral or never face his family again. (Five other siblings had survived, married, and procreated. The entire clan, presumably by fiat, gathered together every Sunday afternoon at my imperious grandmother’s apartment.) At the synagogue for the services, I remember my adamantly non-observant father, leaning stiffly forward on the front bench reserved for the chief mourners, eyes fixed on my Orthodox grandmother’s raw wood coffin as, in the ritual symbolizing bereavement, the rabbi pinned a strip of black grosgrain ribbon to his lapel, then slit it halfway through with a large sharp-bladed scissors. And I remember his striding angrily away from the soggy burial ground the moment the graveside rituals finished, a high wind riffling his thinning hair and the slashed ribbon, tears streaming down his craggy face.

My father was not given to crying. The only other time I saw him breaking down like that was after he examined my glamorous Aunt Flossie, when she came to him, too late (was her delay due to modesty? to fear?) with bleeding from the vagina and he found her far advanced with cancer in her “women’s parts,” as the family would say later. While the patient dressed in his office downstairs, my father joined her husband (my beloved Uncle Harry), who had waited out the examination with my mother (his younger sister), and me (the child who silently absorbed everything) in our living quarters above. As he climbed the stairs towards us, I leaned over the banister and saw that he was weeping. Tersely he delivered his diagnosis, referred to an operation that clearly held out no hope, and poured out two shots of his best whiskey for himself and Uncle Harry. I don’t remember hearing the usual Jewish toast as they raised their glasses and downed their first aid for shock in the customary single gulp: Le’chayim! (To life!).

My father’s own death came too soon. He was only 59. Chronically overworked, he tried to overlook his developing heart condition, resorting occasionally to nitroglycerine tablets for the angina and, absurdly, pacing the living room when he remembered he should exercise. Even after his initial heart attack, he might have been spared if he hadn’t insisted upon rising from his hospital bed to supervise a pressing project–the building of a nursing home inspired, ironically, by his new-found interest in geriatrics. It wasn’t until a decade later that I realized how alike we were (I’d always assumed I took after my artistic mother, who was also easier to love), determined to work until we dropped to fulfill our vision of what could be accomplished with zeal and luck.

Archives for September 2009

Dancing Without Motion

Dr. Bill: Personal Indulgences No. 15