March 14, 2006
The New Yorker: All art, all the time
Recent issues of the New Yorker have been littered with art-related content, from Calvin Tomkins's "Talk of the Town" pieces on "School Days," an exhibition at Jack Tilton Gallery, and Barnaby Furnas (which sent Jenny Davidson down memory lane) to Peter Schjehldal's recent reviews (David Smith, Edvard Munch), and from Jack Handey's tips for painters back to Tomkins for a short profile of Whitney director Adam Weinberg. And let us not forget this gem, from Jack Turner's article on absinthe (not online):
Absinthe and those who drank it became a favorite subject for painters from Degas to Picasso. Paul Verlaine developed the notion of absinthe as the drink of the artistic temperment, proclaiming, "For me, my only glory is a simple, ephemeral absinthe." (Whether or not absinthe aided his intoxicated versifying, it probably helped dull the pain he suffered from syphilis, gonorrhea, rheumatism, and bronchitis.) Verlaine's fellow-poet and sometime lover Arthur Rimbaud was also a student at what he called the "Academy of Absomphe," fuelling his poetics of sensory disorder with the "sagebush of the glaciers." Toulouse-Lautrec went so far as to teach his pet cormorant to drink it. He carried his own dose in a hollowed-out cane and took it "diluted" with cognac, a combination he dubbed "the Earthquake."
I hope the barrage of art-related content continues, as this site will of course no longer be updated once I have made my fame and fortune as the painter of Handey's Still Life with Beets, Cauliflower, Liver, and Large Glass of Beer.