SUNDAY, JUNE 13, 2010 “
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The dog returns to his vomit.” — From a video trailer promoting Glenn Beck’s forthcoming thriller, “The Overton Window.” In the video, an ominous voice reads the last two stanzas from Rudyard Kipling’s 1919 poem, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.”
ART
REVIEW BY AMANDA VAILL
American art went pop, with this man’s help
LEO AND HIS CIRCLE The Life of Leo Castelli By Annie Cohen-Solal Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and the author Knopf. 540 pp. $35
of pop” or “the Italian who in- vented American art” — doesn’t ac- tually hang out his art dealer’s shingle until Page 234 of Annie Co- hen-Solal’s 500-plus-page biogra- phy. The 17 preceding chapters are devoted to a multigenerational saga spanning Renaissance Tusca- ny, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, fascist Trieste and places in be- tween. If you are seeking a juicy, gossip-stuffed dish about the New York art world in the go-go 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, your patience with the myriad details of this familial, economic and social history — the explorations of arcane documents; the descriptions of bustling ports, palatial houses and family patri- archs — may wear thin. But Cohen-Solal is an intellectu- al historian, not a gossip maven.
L LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PHOTOS HISTORY REVIEW BY GARY KRIST Punch drunk on Prohibition
LAST CALL The Rise and Fall of Prohibition By Daniel Okrent Scribner. 468 pp. $30
O
n Jan. 16, 1920 — the day beforeProhi- bition became the law of the land — America’s triumphant “drys” were su- premely optimistic about the future:
“The reign of tears is over,” evangelist Billy Sun- day told a revival meeting in Norfolk, Va. “Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.” But the great landlord Satan needn’t have worried. As Daniel Okrent demonstrates in “Last Call,” his witty and exhaustive new his- tory of Prohibition, the so-called Noble Experi- ment created nothing like a virtuous teetotal- er’s paradise. The 18th Amendment, in fact, didn’t so much end the country’s drinking cul- ture as merely change its ethos, replacing the male-dominated saloon with the sexually in- tegrated speakeasy and turning a public pas- time into a surreptitious exercise in cynicism and hypocrisy. “The drys had their law,” as Ok- rent observes, “and the wets would have their liquor.” And the bootleggers would have their obscene and blood-soaked profits, blissfully free of state and federal taxes. The Prohibition era, of course, is not exactly
unexamined territory. Writers good and bad have been mining this lode for decades, end- lessly rehearsing its familiar tales of tipsy flap- pers, poisonous bathtub gin and tommy-gun battles on the streets of Chicago and New York. Okrent, a writer best known as the first public editor of the New York Times, certainly doesn’t ignore such crowd-pleasing anecdotes. (Really, what self-respecting ironist could resist telling the one about the “sacramental wine” racket run by an alleged rabbi named Patrick Houli- han?) But he brings to his account a breadth of scholarship that allows us to put the shenani- gans in proper perspective. And while the book at times barrages the reader with more detail than is truly necessary, Okrent is never tedious for long. He also takes pains to debunk some of the apocrypha that, thanks to the carelessness of less diligent historians, has become part of the accepted lore of the age. A case in point: Everyone “knows” that Joseph Kennedy, father of our 35th president, was a notorious boot-
Top, officials in New York City pour liquor down a sewer following a raid; above, a woman reveals her secret stash.
legger, right? Okrent points out that there is ab- solutely no credible evidence that this is true. “Last Call” is especially enlightening on the politics of Prohibition. Even as late as 1918, a lot of wets regarded the 18th Amendment as “a dead letter” with virtually no chance of ratifica- tion. Enforced temperance, after all, was a high- ly unpopular concept in many quarters, partic- ularly among city dwellers, immigrants, Catho- lics, Jews, blacks and an awful lot of native-born white Protestant males. Okrent shows how the dry forces — led by powerful interest groups such as the Anti-Saloon League — overcame this stiff opposition, cobbling together an unlikely coalition of rural populists, urban progressives, women and nativists (even the KKK), all of whom had their own peculiar reasons for want- ing to see the demise of legal alcohol. In the end, aided by a ratification process that gave dis-
proportionate weight to voters in rural states, the drys managed to push their amendment through — to the incredulity of wets nationwide. But making a behavior illegal is one thing; making it unpopular is another. Early signs of Prohibition’s effectiveness, such as initial de- clines in alcohol consumption and criminal be- havior, proved to be short-lived. And thanks to the ingenuity of America’s criminal class, it wasn’t long before John Barleycorn was once again on the upswing. By 1926, annual sales of illegal liquor had reached an estimated $3.6 bil- lion — roughly the size of the entire federal budget. In the cities, meanwhile, few people were even pretending to obey the law. “It can- not be truthfully said that prohibition enforce- ment has failed in New York,” one former Jus- tice Department official remarked. “It has not yet been attempted.” By the early 1930s, it was the wets who were making the over-optimistic predictions — about an idyllic future after re- peal. The Depression “will fade away like the mists before the noonday sun,” one wet con- gressman opined. “The immorality of the coun- try . . . will be a thing of the past.” So just how ill-advised was the Noble Experi- ment? Some revisionist scholars have lately tried to rehabilitate its reputation, claiming that our sense of the era’s rampant crime is a Hollywood distortion and that the reduction in alcohol consumption, while it did erode over time, was in fact significant. Okrent concedes at least the latter point, but he doesn’t buy much further into the revisionist line. “In al- most every respect imaginable,” he concludes, “Prohibition was a failure.” But Okrent does note one final paradox that might warm the hearts of disconsolate drys. After the 21st Amendment reversed the 18th (on Dec. 5, 1933),the anything-goes style of bib- ulous scofflaws was quickly stymied by a flood of state and local alcohol regulations. These new measures set licensing requirements for sellers and imposed far more enforceable re- strictions (such as tavern closing hours, age limits and Sunday blue laws) on consumers. The repeal of Prohibition, in other words, “made it harder, not easier, to get a drink.”
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Gary Krist is the author of “The White Cascade.” His book about Chicago in 1919 will be published next year.
The author of a highly regarded study of Jean-Paul Sartre, a former cultural counselor of the French Embassy in the United States and currently a visiting arts professor at New York University, she believes “the true space in which Cas- telli abided” was “History with a capital H, which endures.” Castelli, she implies, was the product of his context and, as a result, the last of his kind. In the world of Castelli’s ancestors, as Cohen-Solal por-
trays it, wealth, negotiation, manipulation, networking and style all commingled; and it is this principle that guided Castelli’s emergence from the cocoon of his privileged Eu- ropean upbringing — sailor suits, private tutors, skiing holidays, the best tailors — to dominate the rowdy New York art world. His banker father built a career on connec- tions and access; the son — although he had no taste for fi- nance — made a wealthy and influential marriage that pro- vided him with the means of escape from Europe in 1939 when others (including his own family) were left to the rav- ages of the Nazis. And in New York, from the base of his fa- ther-in-law’s mansion off Fifth Avenue, Castelli began to put the strengths of his forbears to work. Always attracted to contemporary art — he’d had a brief fling as a partner in a surrealist gallery in Paris on the eve of the war — Castelli sought out Alfred Barr, the legendary cu- rator of the Museum of Modern Art; went to all the 57th Street galleries and befriended their artists, asking them to parties at his father-in-law’s mansion; and became one of only three non-artists to be a founding member of the Ab- stract-Expressionist conclaveThe Club, because, as he said, “the point was to be with these people, to live their lives.” He sidled into the business side of art by becoming an
agent for Wassily Kandinsky’s widow — thus initiating, as Cohen-Solal says, “the modus operandi of selling through personal networks that would be one of the keys to the fu- ture gallerist’s success.” Importantly, he didn’t want to sell older European artists, or even the now-established Amer- ican abstractionists such as Pollock and de Kooning, both personal friends: When Castelli opened his eponymous gal- lery in his father-in-law’s house, the art he wanted to show was whatever was next. “I tried deliberately to detect that other thing,” he said, “and stumbled upon [Robert] Rau- schenberg [and Jasper] Johns.” The shows Castelli devoted to the two artists in early 1958
BIOGRAPHY
LEONARDO’S LEGACY How Da Vinci Reimagined the World By Stefan Klein. Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch. Da Capo. 291 pp. $26
Leonardo da Vinci has so long been sanctified that it’s easy to forget he was human. Fortunately, Stefan Klein paints a fresh portrait rather than further gild- ing an already blinding lily. Leonardo the artist and inventor are
THE ROYAL LIBRARY, WINDSOR CASTLE Detail from Da Vinci’s anatomical analysis of the neck and shoulder.
here, of course, but Klein devotes his most enthusiastic attention to Leonardo the naturalist. He wants to know how his subject saw the world with such a new vi- sion. Klein analyzes how a Renaissance painter could have invented the “explod- ed view” of body parts and machines, his translucent outer structures reveal- ing inner connections. He explores how Leonardo’s gift for analogy in his volumi- nous writings parallels his comparison of organs and tendons to machine parts. To do so, Klein interviews the eccentric hobbyists and scholars who build Leonar- do’s flying machines, and he visits the likely sites of Leonardo’s (conjectural) test flights. Klein consults engineers about
the ingenious water clock. He hikes the terrain that Leonardo explored. Klein’s vivid journeys on Leonardo’s trail help create a sense of the man behind the red chalk self-portraits and make for enjoy- able travel writing. “His notebooks are full of reflections,” Klein writes, “inspired by details other people would likely deem insignificant and ignore.” Leonardo’s perception of nature was astonishing, especially for its time. For instance, he described precise- ly how a dragonfly’s wings move, and he sketched water flows not visible to the normal eye. He dissected bodies far be- yond any need to portray them in paint- ings. Leonardo even painted the first known landscape that lacks a symbolic message. “Driven by curiosity,” Klein adds, “he worked for the sheer pleasure of understanding the world.” —Michael Sims
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created a sensation, launching each as a contemporary mas- ter and propelling the gallerist himself to the white-hot cen- ter of the New York art world. They also established Castel- li’s method: He would nose out the best new talent by pok- ing around galleries and studios, leverage his friendships with museum directors such as Barr into sales or shows that increased his artists’ market value, and use his connections with journalists to promote coverage of the results. At the same time, to free the artists from dependence on individu- al sales, he pioneered the practice of giving them a drawing account from the gallery, to be repaid when their paintings sold. It was an old-world, imperial gesture, in the service of ultra-contemporary work — but then, as this book suggests, so was everything else about Castelli. Castelli represented virtually every major American art- ist of the next two decades, from Frank Stella, James Rosen- quist and Richard Serra to Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichten- stein and Andy Warhol. Indeed, Cohen-Solal suggests that his championship of American artists won them “new stat- ure at home and abroad” and “introduce[d] major new cur- rents into the flow of art history.” Castelli was at the center of controversy numerous times — for, among other things, the alleged arm-twisting at the Venice Biennale that led to Rauschenberg’s receiving the top prize in 1964; for his feud with the Metropolitan Museum’s hard-charging modern curator Henry Geldzahler; for maintaining (and allegedly manipulating) “waiting lists” for certain painters’ work and excluding would-be collectors from it. But by actively searching out provocative new work, by understanding the nexus between art and fashion, and art and commerce, and by creating tentacles of affiliate galleries to promote his art- ists worldwide, this slight, diffident man changed the way the art world worked. If, in the end, new waves in art formed and other dealers (many mentored by Castelli) caught them, none had his effect. As the collector Eli Broad says, “They don’t make Castellis anymore.” Cohen-Solal knew Castelli and many of the participants in his story, and had access to his papers, including date- books that bear witness to his wide-ranging curiosity and passion for detail, and dozens of candid photographs to il- luminate the text. So it may be inevitable that the story she tells is skewed toward the gallerist’s own perspective. It is also — despite her personal knowledge of her subject — not an intimate portrait: Castelli the man, as opposed to the persona he created, remains elusive in these pages, an ele- gant but somehow unknowable figure. But perhaps that’s how Castelli himself would have wanted it. As he remarked, straight-faced, to a reporter once, “There is no such thing as adequate myth-making.”
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Amanda Vaill’s documentary “Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About” won the Emmy and Peabody awards; she is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative titled “Hotel Florida: Love and Death in Spain, 1936-1939.”
eo Castelli (1907-1999) — the man variously referred to in the press as “the Met- ternich of art,” “the svengali
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