The Art Angle

In the early 1900s, art movements within the then-burgeoning category of modern art were exploding in multiple directions, and among them was a strand called Orphism. What was it? In some ways, it is hard to say. Relatively short-lived and debated even as soon as it was coined around 1912, Orphism was a form of abstract art, informed by motion, radial shapes of vibrant colors. Most known and neatly associated with Orphism are Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who thought colors could be used to create visual harmonies, where form and hue worked on a canvas in the same way that notes worked to build a piece of music. The artist could be thought of as composer. And yet the contours movement is still somewhat vague. In fact, there were debates about what Orphism was or meant from within the group that was most often associated with it. It remains elusive. My co-host, the art critic Ben Davis, recently went to a major showing of Orphist works, an exhibition called “Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” at the Guggenheim, in New York that opened earlier this month and will run until March 2025. We discussed about the art form and its impact as well as some of the the unanswered questions he left the show with.

As a novelist, Jonathan Lethem is basically a genre all his own. His books mash up literary fiction and pulp into disorienting but engaging combinations, for which he’s won both a MacArthur Grant and the National Book Award. Since the success of Motherless Brooklyn in 1999, he's published many very well received novels—including The Fortress of Solitude in 2003 and Brooklyn Crime Novel, from last year—as well as many more short stories and essays for places including the New Yorker, Harper’s and Rolling Stone. And it turns out he's written a lot about art too—enough in fact, to fill an entire volume. Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture, published this summer by ZE Books, is its own type of unexpected hybrid of writing. It spans genres, containing short stories, essays, and criticism, as well as types of art, its essays hopping between his reverence for a Hans Holbein at the Frick and respect for the “scratchiti” artist Pray. Part of the joy of the book is Lethem’s determinedly eclectic and personal taste, giving his attention to both names you know and obscure children’s book authors or indie comics artists. Among other things, Cellophane Bricks offers Lethem's personal recollections of growing up around artists, including his father, painter Richard Lethem, in the grassroots alternative art world rooted in the collective spaces of a pre-gentrified Brooklyn. He also writes of the ethos of the graffiti-art world around his brother, Blake "KEO" Lethem. Aside from a spirit of unconventionality, the biographical material may seem to come from another world from the delirious and sometimes fantastic short fictions in the volume, mostly written for artist catalogues for the likes of Nan Goldin, Jim Shaw, and Fred Tomaselli and gathered here for the first time. However, these also embody an ethos that clearly relates to the communal creative scenes of his youth: Lethem insists on only offering short stories as catalogue contributions, paying with his art, while accepting only artworks in return as payment. There’s more still to Cellophane Bricks: essays on what it means to live with art, and varied reflections on what art and literature, word and image, bring to each other. Introducing Lethem at an event recently at the Brooklyn Public Library, the art critic Dan Fox said that, as a novelist, Lethem had left the same kind of indelible mark on how people see Brooklyn that Warhol had on Manhattan. With Cellophane Bricks, he is leaving his imprint on the art world. A footnote for the future: The book is nicely illustrated with pictures of the eclectic work it describes, and next year, the art from Cellophane Bricks the basis for a show that will be at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in Southern California. “Jonathan Lethem’s Parallel Play: Contemporary Art and Art Writing” is described as “a chronicle of an author who roams among visual artists,” and ill feature art by Gregory Crewdson, Rosalyn Drexler, Charles Long, and others. Look out for it.

Legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is famous for his deep dives into topics of American history, ranging from the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, the Civil War, and the history of baseball, to name just a few.  Now Burns is delving into the fascinating life of 15th century genius Leonardo da Vinci, examining his life and his numerous roles as a draftsman, painter, and scientist. This venture marks the first time the director has tackled a subject that is not American. The film, which is divided into two, two-hour segments was co-written by his daughter Sarah Burns along with Dave McMahon, and was directed and produced by all three. Leonardo's many notable achievements are explored via close examination and analysis of his prolific personal notebooks alongside accounts of his life and on-camera interviews with leading scholars, contemporary artists, engineers, and some famous fans like biographer Walter Isaacson and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.  Leonardo da Vinci also marks a departure from Burns's traditional filmmaking style, in which a pan or zoom added in post-production across a still image gives the illusion of movement.  That style of filmmaking has become so closely associated with his material that it has garnered his own filter in iMovie software as what else? "The Ken Burns effect," of course. However, here, the filmmakers use split screens with images, videos, and sound effects from a range of time periods to highlight da Vinci's many achievements through his artistic and scientific explorations, along with the original music commission from celebrated composer Caroline Shaw. It creates a compelling effect and new stylistic approach for the iconic documentarian. This week, Burns joins Senior Market Editor Eileen Kinsella to discuss the endlessly revelatory and fascinating life of Leonardo.

Re-Air from August 15,2024 There’s so much culture now that it can be hard just to keep up, let alone to think about it all as a whole… but that only makes the effort to find perspective more important. It’s not always clear when you’re in the thick of it, but almost certainly when people in the future look back, they will see more clearly than we do the common concerns beneath the fragmented surface of the culture of the 2020s. The literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has an idea about all this. She argues that what characterizes the art of the now might be, in fact a particular hunger for now-ness. Her book published this year by Verso is called “Immediacy or the Style of Too Late Capitalism.” Across a broad array of culture, both high and low, Kornbluh tracks, as she writes, “immediacy as a master category for making sense of 21st century cultural production.” She shows how the drive towards immediacy can help explain a vast array of developments and asks why. It’s a thin but challenging book. Immediacy was Ben Davis’s pick for our summer reading list, and we’re not the only ones who has found it useful. In the magazine Art Review, author Alex Niven wrote that Kornbluh has done better than almost anyone in recent memory to define the elusive claustrophobic spirit of the age. It’s heady terrain to explore, and this week on the podcast, Kornbluh joins Ben Davis to guide us through it.