Culture Watch
In this issue:
BOOKS:
Think you know all about Rembrandt? His paintings and his world are expertly and stylishly re-visited by historian Simon Schama in Rembrandt's Eyes.FILM:
From Spain, director Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother is all about women and pays a grand tribute to women, their friendships and ability to renew themselves.AND CONSIDER THIS:
One of the teens who integrated a Little Rock school in the '50s, Melba Pattillo Beals in her memoir White Is a State of Mind, looks back on her life. On CBS's Judging Amy, Tyne Daley plays one of TV's few drawn-from-life older women.
BOOKS:
Rembrandt's Eyes by Simon Schama
(Knopf; 750 pages; $50 - Amazon: $35)
Ask anyone to name the world's most
famous master of brush and palette and chances are the reply will
be this: Rembrandt. All those Dutch men and women in somber black
with stiff, chalk-white ruffs at their neck, those self-portraits
of the artist with his deep introspective gaze. Ah, yes, we think,
Rembrandt. Yes, we know him. So much has been written about
him in art-history tomes and psycho-pop biographies that there scarcely
seems a need for yet another book. But Simon Schama is no ordinary
writer and this is no ordinary book. A British-born historian who
now teaches in the U.S., he has made his reputation--and alarmed
many academicians--by viewing the past through the prism of art
and then writing about it with vigor and style. The social and political
backdrop of Rembrandt's Eyes is 17th century Holland, and
in the foreground is a group portrait with the artist, a majestic
central figure who looks directly out at us across two centuries.
Schama has created with words what Rembrandt created with paint:
the substance of life and the shadows that pass across it.
War, rumors of war, deprivation and
Croesus-like wealth characterized life in the religiously divided
Netherlands of Rembrandt's day. Schama guides the reader through
this complex terrain, branching out in leisurely excursions to explore
the historical byways of Dutch art, the conflicts between Catholics
and Calvinists and the lives of the painters who influenced Rembrandt
or were his rivals.
In his early 20s Rembrandt
was already an accomplished painter in Leiden with a studio
and pupils. But the miller's son had ambitions his home town could
not satisfy. Amsterdam was the place to be. As time went by, his
fortunes there rose, he married and his son Titus was born. Then
his art went out of fashion. Commissions became fewer. Loss clung
like a shroud. His wife died, and much later his common-law wife
succumbed as well. Creditors sprang up from everywhere, and
his home and most of his possessions were sold off. At the end,
the plague carried away his beloved Titus. Through it all, he kept
working, turning out drawings, etchings, paintings, and as his life
changed and darkened, so did his art. It became richer, deeper.
The eyes of the book's title have loaded
meaning. Blindness, both internally and externally, fascinated Rembrandt.
He painted Homer and Samson; he painted sightless beggars and the
elderly. "Rembrandt's entire career was a dialogue between outward
and inward vision,'' Schama writes, "between the glitter of the
hard, unforgivingly metallic surface of the world and the vulnerability
of mortal flesh.'' And then there are the eyes in the self-portraits,
painted while he regarded his own image reflected in a mirror. In
the later ones especially Rembrandt does not flatter himself--or
us. As Schama describes them in one painting, the eyes are deep
set and black, "the brows raised a little as if accustomed to discomfort,
ringed round and round again with puff circles, wheels within wheels
that speak of nights without sleep, of sorrows without end, of the
crushing weight of life's travail.''
Schama makes a compelling case for Rembrandt
as modernist. Over time, he abandoned the slick, enamel-like painted
surfaces adored by the good burghers. The threads of the canvas,
the brush's defiant jabs and emotional thrusts assume weight, take
on importance. In Rembrandt's hands, they are not just the medium,
they are part of the story. The drawings and etchings, Schama argues,
show Rembrandt becoming fascinated by the possibility that doing
the work itself, the physical process, could be the subject of art
as much as the objects being represented.
It is Rembrandt as humanist who awakens
our emotions, and Schama makes that abundantly and movingly clear.
He painted the well-to-do, of course. He had to; his vanity demanded
it, and they paid well. But he didn't flatter, and he made hundreds
of works of ordinary people, the flesh of their faces with pits
and pocks, sagging with worry, haggard and worn. He somehow seems
able both to understand and--far more difficult--portray the totality
of existence, the union of life with death. The later self-portraits
radiate with a sense of our common mortality. Time and care have
stripped away outward ambition and worldly desire, Rembrandt's eyes
tells us, but I, I remain.
FILM:
All About My Mother
Written and directed by Pedro Almodovar
Pedro Almodovar likes women. Let's
take that a step farther and say he loves women and he loves what
it is to be a woman, even if you happen to be a man. The Spanish
director's newest film, All About My Mother, is a poignant
and touching tale of tangled female relationships and maternal instincts.
Manuela (the heartbreaking Cecilia Roth) is a hard-working
single mother of a teen. An accident on a rain-soaked night in Madrid
forces her to revive old memories and retrace painful footsteps.
Traveling to Barcelona, Manuela joins up with an old chum, a transvestite
whose realistic appraisal of sex and the body is her (his?) means
of survival. Manuela's circle of friends grows to include the pagan--an
aging lesbian actress and her young addicted girlfriend--and the
saintly--a doomed young and pregnant nun. The movie has already
won a Golden Globe and is an odds'-on favorite for the other one,
the one named Oscar.
The most overused and shallow word
of the '90s--remember them?--was "closure.'' It would crop
up whenever death or treachery caused injury, as if there were a
magic door we could walk through and shut behind us, leaving the
past behind and making all hurts vanish. Almodovar here gets it
right. Pain leaves an imprint. It lingers, stays underneath the
heart and with time and new experiences is transformed, given meaning.
In the flash of a second, the world Manuela built for herself shatters.
There's no closure for her; she accepts grief at the same time as
she receives and returns love.
Almodovar pays tribute to the classic backstage
drama of All About Eve and chain-smoking Bette Davis, and
central to his plot are the tragic Southern sisters Blanche and
Stella of Streetcar Named Desire. It's more than a nice touch
or a directorial homage to pop female icons. Bette, Blanche and
Stella here represent three sides of the eternally female: the powerful
woman fighting for what she wants, the fragile creature always depending
on the kindness of strangers, and the mother prepared to do anything
to protect her child.
Books:
White Is a State of Mind by Melba Pattillo Beals
(Berkley; 338 pages:$12.95 - Amazon: $11.01)
For the African-American students who integrated
Little Rock's Central High School back in 1957, the second year
was unendurable. As if white opposition from students and
adults wasn't enough, under economic pressure many in the black
community were demanding an end to the brave effort. Melba Pattillo
Beals, one of the "Little Rock Nine,'' recalls the fear and upheaval
of those days in White Is a State of Mind, newly out in paperback.
(Her previous memoir Warriors Don't Cry won the Robert F. Kennedy
Book Award.) Unable to bear the torment, Beals is sent by the NAACP
to California, and to her shock, is placed in the care of a white
family. It is a turning point for the insecure young Southerner.
Beals courageously writes about the struggle to keep her footing
on the quicksand of race relations, as she becomes a college student,
a wife and mother and finally breaks free to stand tall as a writer
and her own woman in America's Black - and-white world.
TELEVISION
Judging Amy; CBS
The scarcity of African-Americans and Hispanics in TV series made headlines last year, and producers yelled for re-writes. Did anyone mention the non-presence of older women? The strong, independent woman over 50 is almost extinct on evening television. One good exception is Maxine, the no-nonsense mother, grandmother and social worker played by the admirable Tyne Daley in Judging Amy. Daley refuses to make Maxine a lovable character; she's prickly and stubborn. She speaks her mind and is capable of making a mistake. But she's woman enough to say so and then get on with it. ©
