John Wyver writes: welcome to this week’s selection of stuff that I’ve enjoyed and been enriched by over the past week.
• Frank Stella went from Bauhaus to fun house: such a great appraisal by Deborah Solomon for The New York Times of the art and life of the artist who died on Saturday; I feel I’ve been looking at Stella’s art for most of my life, ever since in 1971 I bought the slim Penguin New Art volume about him written by Robert Rosenblum – I learned so much from that (I was 16, and just starting to look at modern art), and as my photo shows I still have it in my library, 53 years on. Plus, here’s a short Christie’s video of a studio visit with the artist five years back:
John Wyver writes: Apologies for missing last week – somehow the keynote for the University of Westminster conference Designs on TV, together with other stuff, just gobbled up the days. But here’s this week’s selection of twelve articles and audio elements that have engaged and informed and challenged me over, well, the last fortnight.
And I start with a link that would have led last Sunday, just a few days after the death of the great Kent and England spin bowler Derek Underwood. The image above is from my 1968 autograph book, when I spent many happy days at Canterbury, Folkestone and elsewhere watching the Kent team, with Underwood bowling to the equally legendary Alan Knott behind the stumps.
He always had that boyish air of one who simply wanted to play the game. It was the look of the daring young RAF officer held up in Colditz, the quiet but determined one, first to join the escape committee and start the fight again. He was the Leslie Howard of the game. All these things I will remember. Rest in peace, Derek Underwood.
And here’s a short video celebration from the Guardian:
• Unwrapping Ancient Egypt, ten years on: on her blog this week, my friend Christina Riggs published three fascinating posts [the link is to the first, the others are here and here] marking a decade since the publication of her major study, Unwrapping Ancient Egypt, now available via Bloomsbury. She combines a personal account of her path to and beyond the book with lessons for us all about writing and publishing, with a brilliant top-level critique of Egyptology and its deep entanglement with colonialism (including excellent links to further reading, much of it open access), and with more wide-ranging thoughts about decolonisation across museums and academia.
John Wyver writes: the week’s collection of articles and audio that I have enjoyed, learned from, appreciated and been challenged by over the past week, and that I think are worth sharing.
Actress Maria Schneider remained friends with Brando until his death in 2004, but Brando and Bertolucci’s behavior was inexcusable. Brando also delivers an irreducibly complex performance of the highest empathy and sensitivity, a performance that reveals what his work, at its best, could achieve: An illumination of the idea that people are more than one thing and that multiple, seemingly conflicting things can be true at the same time.
John Wyver writes: In November the distinguished art historian Lynda Nead (link to her page at Birkbeck, where she is now Emerita Professor), who is also a friend, gave the prestigious Paul Mellon Lectures at the V&A. In four original and wonderfully rich presentations titled British Blonde about aspects of the visual culture of post-war Britain, she explored the images and meanings associated with four iconic blondes: two actors, Diana Dors and Barbara Windsor; Ruth Ellis, who murdered her abusive lover and was the last woman to be hanged in Britain; and the artist Pauline Boty.
She also kindly persuaded the Paul Mellon Centre to commission academic and filmmaker Catherine Grant and me to respond to her ideas by making two short films each about her subjects, which were screened with a panel discussion on a fifth evening. Mine were made as close collaborations with colleagues Ian Cross, for Blonde Noir about Ellis, and Todd MacDonald, for the visual essay on Boty. Ian, Todd and I worked together on our two documentaries Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today, 2020, and Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain, 2021, and to some degree, on a much more modest scale, these 5-minute shorts extend our interest in working creatively with archive images and films, and in developing distinctive screen languages for this.
John Wyver writes: On the way to New Haven for a screening and panel at Yale (so, yes, look out for another Postcard from there), I spent a busy day and a half in New York. These was a time when I travelled across the Atlantic a lot, but I hadn’t been to Manhattan since 2014. Not that it seems to have changed a great deal, although I was disconcerted to discover that arriving visitors do not need to fill in immigration and customs’ forms at the airport.
Cannabis shops appear to be everywhere, as are citibikes, and there are cycle lanes on the main north-south avenues. The subway is as strange and surreal a world as ever, peopled by the homeless and the troubled, and blighted by decades of under-investment, and yet a marvel of modernity that is cheaper and more democratic (a single fare to anywhere) than the Underground.
There was, of course, a great diner just by my hotel, and my ham and eggs, large OJ, and limitless coffee was as glorious a treat as ever. And there are still many of the greatest museums and galleries in the world, a handful of which was my excuse for stopping over.
John Wyver writes: V&A South Kensington is hosting, until 22 September, Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence, a comparatively small-scale exhibition about the fascinating topic of, as the website says, ‘a unique style of mid-century architecture which fused the clean lines of European Modernism with the hot, humid conditions of West Africa.’ Developed by British architects including Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, its exemplary buildings were created for Ghana as the country was approaching independence from the British Empire, and also in India, most notably by Le Corbusier and colleagues in the city of Chandigarh.
John Wyver writes: I am lucky enough to be in New York for a couple of nights (look out for a ‘Postcard’ from the city here soon) and I spent yesterday afternoon in the peerless permanent collections galleries of the Museum of Modern Art. In the Collections 1980s-Present rooms, there is a space, presumably with a reinforced floor, devoted to the late Richard Serra’s monumental Equal, 2015, which absolutely captivated me. With the work almost to myself, I took a lot of photographs.
John Wyver writes: I had been looking forward to Peter Biskind‘s latest book, which in the States is titled Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile and Greed Upended TV, and which over here carries the slightly desperate, and arguably reportable to the ASA, subtitle The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television. His Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex. Drugs and Rock’n’Roll Generation Saved Hollwood is a classic, chronicling the mainstream American film industry of the 1970s. Amd of course, with my Sky and Netflix subs, I have been following the tale he explores in Pandora’s Box since The Sopranos and The Wire.
John Wyver writes: as usual, a selection of articles and audio that caught my attention this past week. The image above, which relates to my first choice, is a detail from Anatole Godet’s photograph of“Portrait de Emile Zola” par Manet, 1872-74, an albumen silver print courtesy of the wonderful Getty open content programme. Happy Easter.
• Is it even good?: like Brandon Taylor, who for the LRB writes – brilliantly – about Emile Zola’s twenty Les Rougon-Macquart novels [£, limited free access], I too have been working my way through this massive cycle of late nineteenth-century naturalism. And like him, I have been reading them in the excellent new editions, translated by Brian Nelson and others, and published by Oxford World’s Classics.
To date, it’s taken me longer than his two years, and working my way through them in publication order, I have four and a half to go. And I too am stuck part way through The Dream, published in 1888, of which Brandon writes, ‘The book insists so firmly and intensely on its own feelings that the reader is totally shut out.’ Yep.
But he also proposes that, ‘You will probably never read all twenty of Les Rougon-Macquart. I know that. You know that. Let us accept this truth between us.’ Well, no, Brandon. I’ll get there. Just give me time. I know the journey will have been worth it.
