End-of-week treats #10
Delulu and outraged and cuddly and uncertain and uncowed and so very serious and little and hilarious, all at once, like light shifting in cloud
Isn’t she magnificent 👆? That’s Anne, the wife of Joachim, taking a minute, in Lorenzetti’s 14th-century depiction of the birth of her daughter, Mary, mother of Jesus. I love absolutely everything about this painting (see the whole thing here). The fabrics (look at that tartan), the geometric spaces, the heaviness and strength of her body, the tired kindness in all the faces and gestures, the colours, just all of it.
Not that we’ve planned it, but my kid and I have been getting through early morning wake-ups and get-readys by singing alternate phrases from Maria from The Sound of Music. She: “A flibbertigibbet?” Me: “A will-o'-the-wisp?” She: “A clown?”
It’s the perfect song. And, I’m realising, a near-perfect encapsulation of what being 11 is too, delulu and outraged and cuddly and uncertain and uncowed and so very serious and little and hilarious, all at once, like light shifting in the ether. To the leitmotiv questions, “How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?” and '“How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?”, the answer is of course that you don’t. You just marvel.
I’ve had a deadline every day of this week and several for next week too, so this is an expedient list. Just wanted to send you some treasures to buoy your spirits. Soon I have an interview with the incredible photographer and poet, Takenya Holness, for you. So hold tight, brb. <3 UPDATE: That interview is now up, here.
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s orginal score for Maria, a bit of thrill in its own right.
Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300 ‒1350 at the National Gallery, which I saw on the press opening morning and kind of just wanted to live in, alone, for several weeks. Included is the above masterpiece and countless others. Laetitia, il faut absolument que tu viennes. Patricia et Jean-Daniel aussi, venez, comme j’aimerais la voir avec vous. Que de merveilles …
Emma Franks’s painting, which I discovered in the Gate of Horns: Myths of Resistance, Symbols of Defiance exhibition Hettie Judah has curated at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate …
… alongside Alexis Hunter’s pen and ink washes, from her 1998 Hormone series:
5. Tacita Dean’s new book, Why Cy (Mack Books), on Cy Twombly’s work — I talked with her about why and how she made it for a piece which is finally up, so you can read it here. Whenever I can now, as I recently explained, I’ll spend time in the library looking through old catalogues or forgotten books on an artist because you get so many more details than you otherwise will if you just rely on Google and the latest interviews. For this piece, Dean mentioned first seeing Twombly’s work at the Whitechapel in a show Nicholas Serota curated way before being the head of the Tate was on his radar. So I found the catalogue, edited by Harald Szeemann, and just got lost for a long minute. Also, for real for real, there was glitter in the folds of this book.
Cy Twombly, Apollo and the Artist, 1975; Adonais, 1975
Dean’s love for Twombly is lifelong and bone-deep. A lot of it is about language, starting with her own name, Tacita, which means “silent” in Latin. “The effect my name has had on me is huge in terms of, you know, needing silence and that connection to the classical past,” she told me. “That's probably one of the triggers for why I was so attracted to Cy.” In 2018, she made a film called Antigone, in 2018, about her sister's name (which means something like “worthy of one’s parents,” “the noble and courageous child of”). She’d started writing it when she was a student, trying to get at the origin of her sister’s name and story, and also the original Antigone. Of her love for Twombly, she said “I'm sure that's connected – the naming of things, why we're named. You know, we,” her sister and herself, “were definitely named”, she laughed, “by our parents.”
I wonder to what extent our naming our daughter “Tsubamé” after a bird – つばめ, meaning “swallow”, “hirondelle” – is shaping her life. Before she was born, we called her Pochi-kun. We didn’t know she was a girl until she arrived and until she did, I just assumed she’d be Kiyo, because it was her great-grandmother’s name and I’d loved that name since the first time I’d met Kiyo. But then this tiny girl did arrive, and she was not a Kiyo. She was, however, Tsubamé. Look how beautiful, her kanji (Chinese character, the proper way to write her name):
燕
Loved this New Yorker profile of David Hammons, describing him as a “supernatural noticer”:
“David knew the houses where the great jazz musicians lived. To walk with David is a lesson in seeing, and not just ordinary seeing. He’s a supernatural noticer.”
and relaying this anecdote:
“In 2017, when the museum acquired Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man), by Charles White, Hammons’s mentor, Christophe Cherix, the curator of drawings, asked Hammons for advice on how to present it. A somewhat mysterious image of a heavily robed man wearing an ecclesiastical headdress, Black Pope was one of White’s greatest works, Hammons told him, and the only way to do it justice was to pair it with a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. Complex negotiations with the Royal Collection, in London, ensued, aided by Glenn Lowry, MoMA’s director, and the Tate Gallery’s Nicholas Serota, and from October 17, 2017, to January 3, 2018, Black Pope and a brush-and-ink drawing by Leonardo, identified as The drapery of a kneeling figure, were on view in a two-artist exhibition at the museum.”
Also loved this open letter Cynthia Erivo posted to Jason Bolden, the man who’s styled all through the awards seasons. And BOY has he styled her.
“We could extemporize about the dresses and the designs and the colors and the structures and the shapes and fabrics and that, honestly, would be enough, but it is love and care with which you do it all, it’s the way you inject calm on purpose before a big carpet, or the sweet worry or nervousness that you try to hide before you send me off to sing on an Oscar stage, that makes you who you are. You see your skill is not just stylist, your skill is discovering, then sharing who it is you’re working with, and with me it’s creating a stylistic landscape that gives me the space to simply exist as my fullest self. You see me. I feel loved. I know you fight for me, when others don’t see me as clearly.”
Still thinking about the Robert Glasper gig me and Grace went to in November, when Erivo suddenly appeared on stage and whistled the concert hall into pin-drop silence. She is Tacita and Antigone and Persephone and Zeus, all in one.
My new favourite motivational speaker: “try it curiously, try it trepidaciously, try it awkwardly, who cares?” being exactly the general idea, innit. <3
World of Echo
Arthur Russell, Losing My Taste for the Night Life
Abel Selaocoe, Voices of Bantu
Tissilawen, Amidinine
John Moreland, No Time
The National, The Alcott
Piers Faccini & Ballaké Sissoko, One Half of a Dream