Guests Of Honor At The Kunstmuseum
The Kunstmuseum's stone courtyard features Rodin's bronze Burgers of Calais, their hands pleading or raised as if in self-defense, their shoulders and heads turned or bowed, their steps heavy. The wide stairway in the museum itself ascends to another Rodin, and the first floor's spacious entry hall has two more, along with a bronze by Aristide Maillol. From there, you can head to the right towards one of the museum's current exhibitions, "A Guest of Honor II: Manet Zola Cézanne. Portrait of the Modern Writer."
Its centerpiece is a painting from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the second in the Kunstmuseum's series of "guests of honor": Manet's "Portrait of Émile Zola." A second painting, Cézanne's "Paul Alexis reads to Zola," complements the first. The exhibition also features photographs of a number of nineteenth-century French painters and writers, including Zola, Cézanne, Manet, and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. These photographs are mostly portraits which do not reveal the trades of their subjects. None of the painters is shown in a studio or with any of the trappings of his trade. Nadar's photograph of Baudelaire makes him look less like a poet than like a very stern professional—a preacher, even, or a lawyer. In contrast, several large photographs of Zola in his apartment, with him sitting at or standing next to a desk covered with paper and books, make it clearer that he is a writer. Only the photograph of Mallarmé also suggests its subject's occupation—he is seated at a small table, with pen and paper. Perhaps appropriately, given the long periods of creative silence Mallarmé experienced throughout his life, the sheet of paper is blank.
Like the photographs's of the author, Manet's painting of Zola clearly marks its subject's occupation, not just with pens and books but also with a copy of Zola's monograph defending Manet's work against its attackers. The writer's defense of the artist is further emphasized by a print of Manet's controversial "Olympia" above the writer's desk, which is partially covering another print, a copy of Velázquez's "Triumph of Bacchus". The copy from which that print was made may have been by Goya, or by Célestin Nanteuil; the exhibition offers us both for our examination, along with the two Japanese paintings which complete the halo of art surrounding Zola in Manet's painting. Only "Olympia" is missing, but then Manet's portrait of Zola only includes a print of that work—several of which are currently in Basel.
In a sense, the exhibition's emphasis is on the portrait of the modern writer, and not on the portrait of the modern writer—but it would be very difficult to do the latter in a museum. After all, the strengths of museums lie in presenting images and not in presenting words. These photographs and paintings of writers depict either someone who could well have had just about any occupation or a writer marked as such by images of the tools of the trade. Only Cézanne's "Paul Alexis reads to Zola" manages to do more than that. The poet Paul Alexis, a friend of Zola's and Cézanne's, worked for a while as Zola's secretary. Part of Alexis's job was to read Zola's texts out loud to Zola, so that the author could get a sense of the effect of his own work on a reader. The painting depicts this extraordinary scene. Zola is marked as the author by the pen he holds in his hand, but it is Alexis who is holding the manuscript and reading; the literary work itself seems to become visible, its transmission a possible object of representation. In the rippling folds of Zola's red cloak, the painting shimmers with sound.
The Cézanne makes this exhibition a must—not because it is a better painting than the Manet, but because it is part of a private collection. If you miss the Manet, you can always at least fantasize about going to the Musée d'Orsay to see it later. But if you miss the Cézanne, you might have lost your only chance to see it. The exhibition really contains two "guests of honor."
The Kunstmuseum has recently begun to feature a different kind of guest of honor as well, in a series called "Jazz at the Kunstmuseum." On a recent Saturday evening in April, a black Jazz by Off Beat banner hung in front of the first-floor entrance hall's central sculpture, Rodin's marble "Striding Man," and in front of the banner stood a piano and half-circles of chairs for the audience.
This sculpture was a particularly appropriate backdrop for Brad Mehldau's solo concert. His performance was filled with the drive of the "striding man" as well as the dignity of a Burger of Calais. He spoke very little, only making a few short announcements in the course of two long sets; in the first of these, he surprised his audience by revealing that the opening pieces were compositions by Brian Wilson (of the Beach Boys), Radiohead, and the seventies songwriter Nick Drake—not standard sources for jazz.
The Radiohead piece, "Paranoid Android," was especially compelling, with its powerful rhythm and an arrangement full of surprising twists and sudden shifts in volume and register. Only the fourth piece, Jerome Kern's "Long Ago and Far Away," was a conventional jazz "standard"—but one dissected as thoroughly as the three previous pieces had been. Full of edgy, staccato effects, it swung into and out of nervousness. With it, Mehldau showed off the extreme independence not just of his hands but of his fingers: he often had two melody lines running in counterpoint, and when he really began to let the arpeggios boil, even more lines seemed to be weaving around each other. The set closer then showed that he could be emotionally overpowering without showing off his technique; with the Beatles' "Mother Nature's Son," he stayed quite close to the original melody, quietly adding simple variations to great effect.
That piece was perhaps less like the "Striding Man" than like the other Rodin to the right of the piano as you came up the stairs. The weathered bronze head, "Pierre de Wissant," gives the impression of tears, flowing not just down the face but over the entire head. It is leaned slightly to the side, as if it were trying to hear something, the way that Mehldau's "Mother Nature's Son" seemed to be trying to hear "subtle little wets" floating around and through the melody.
The second set showcased a suite of "Elegies" which will appear on Mehldau's forthcoming solo album. They brought the house down with their emotional intensity, overpowering technique, and dramatic development. Cézanne's painting of Alexis reading to Zola communicates the energy of fiction through the depiction of its reading; Mehldau's "Elegies" were wordless poems and stories carried along by the lyricism and drama of his melodies. The most overpowering moment came not in one of the forte passages running improvised melodies through floods of arpeggios—though such peaks were impressive—but in an extremely slow passage in the third piece of the five. In it, Mehldau played hardly any notes, seeming again and again to be one chord from resolution, one single chord to end the piece. Every time, though, he would play an unexpected chord, or even just one note, deferring resolution while still promising that it was just around the corner. Instead, he slowly began to build the piece up again, and what had sounded like a conclusion turned out to be the middle of the piece.
In July of 1891, Mallarmé and Berthe Morisot paid a visit to Claude Monet's studio, during which Monet offered the poet a canvas of his choice as a present. On his way home with the wrapped painting on his knees, Mallarmé remarked to Morisot: "One thing I am happy about is living in the same age as Monet." Mallarmé had the pleasure of following the development of Manet, Zola, Cézanne, and Morisot herself, as well as Monet; we only have the pleasure of living after them. We see their careers (and that of Mallarmé as well) not as processes but as wholes. But we have our own pleasures to replace those Mallarmé experienced: I for one am happy to be living in the same age as Brad Mehldau, and as he is still young, I—and you, too—can look forward to hearing him play for decades to come.
