Navigation

Archive | Reviews

The Magic Social Realism of Alice Neel

April 14, 2017 in Age Matters, Art Matters, Book Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Reviews
    Born January 28, 1900, the painter Alice Neel grew up right along the twentieth century, though she was less a product of her time than a harbinger of times to come. Significant success eluded her until the sixties; a true Aquarian, she was built for that decade of upheaval–and this new century of upheaval, too. Today, her hard gems of truth and beauty illuminate what we most need to see.

    Neel first came on my radar as I was rushing through a gallery of contemporary paintings at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, were I screeched to a full stop in front of her 1974 portrait of former museum department head John I. H. Baur. With a palette of slate and ochre and a bold, almost slapdash brushstroke, she’d conveyed him as an institutional hack and a bemused enabler. It was rueful and rich, and though I hurried on, when I saw the Zwirner gallery was hosting a show of her work, I hurried right there as well.

    These paintings of her family, neighbors, friends, lovers, and political comrades in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side are not perfect. In some cases, they could ask more, tell more. But they resonate as few twentieth-century portraits do because they are so vibrant and cock-sure – so defiantly gripping.

    Hilton Als reviews theater, not fine arts, for The New Yorker. Yet he curated this Zwirner exhibition, perhaps because Neel’s intensely democratic curiosity mirrors his own. (His Neel book will be released this June.) In a catalog essay, he shares what this child of West Indian immigrants, raised in deep Brooklyn to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, initially recognized in her work Continue Reading →

American Tragedy on Film

January 14, 2017 in Book Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Film Matters, Reviews

I’ve been trying to figure out why I love “Patriots Day” so much. Though I moved to New York City from Greater Boston decades ago, it’s a fact that you can take the girl out of Massachusetts, but you can’t take the Massachusetts out of a girl. And “Patriots Day,” Peter Berg’s adaptation of the book Boston Strong by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, is one of the most Massachusetts-proud movies ever made. But I also love this docu-drama because it has enough heart and brains to help heal its audience.

The United States always has had a hard time navigating tragedy. Perhaps this is because, in the grand scale of world civilizations, we are a very young nation. When it comes to boundless optimism, this often works to our advantage. Even today, Americans tend to believe that a good attitude and persistence can change the most direst of circumstances. It is the backbone of our founding story – how we scrappy mavericks defeated the Brits – and certainly the classic Hollywood premise. But the downside of our youthfulness is a widespread, culturally reinforced immaturity. This translates into an immunity to critical thought and an inability to process complex emotions. So when confronted with trauma, we are uniquely ill-equipped to grieve without resorting to finger-pointing or dissociation. To the degree that we address our pain, we do so through the arts – especially film and television, which, even more than sports, is our common denominator. Continue Reading →

‘Live by Night,’ Dead on Arrival

January 13, 2017 in Book Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

Once again awards season is rolling around, and a person named Affleck is reaping accolades. But this is 2016, the topsy-turviest year on recent record, so the Affleck who’ll likely score an Academy Award nod is not Ben Affleck but younger brother Casey. (Sexual harassment accusations notwithstanding, he is unreasonably good in “Manchester-by-the-Sea.”) The irony, of course, is that the older Affleck is also releasing a film this season: “Live by Night,” an adaptation of the 2012 eponymous Dennis Lehane novel. That Big Ben’s first directorial effort since 2012’s Oscar-winning “Argo” is receiving very little publicity is surprising – at least, unless you’ve seen it.

To be fair, this Prohibition-era drama is not exactly bad. Set in a crime underbelly of Massachusetts, it’s tried-and-true territory for the native Bostonian, who in 2007 adapted Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone and has set two other films in the region. But the whole endeavor feels disappointingly by the numbers, perhaps because Ben (Casey is not associated with the film) seems intent on creating an instant classic, a period picture with “Scarface” grit and golden Hollywood glamour, complete with speakeasies, flappers, and Tommy guns. The result feels more like a facsimile of a facsimile – blurry and haplessly un-emphatic. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy