December 31, 2010
In London, Private Homes on Display By ANDREW FERREN
AS the last tinges of lavender faded from the fall sky, a group of people lingered for a moment beneath a flickering gas lamp on the threshold of an 18th-century London town house. Were it not for the cars on the street, it might have been a scene from a century ago.
But as I soon discovered, the real leap back in time doesn’t take place until you step through the doorway of the Dennis Severs House (18 Folgate Street; dennissevershouse.co.uk). Mr. Severs (1948-99) was an artist whose masterpiece was his own home, a 1724 Georgian house near East London’s Spitalfields market, once the city’s principal textile exchange. Here Mr. Severs — an American expatriate turned hard-core Anglophile — lived much as he would have in George III’s day, with fireplaces for heat and candles for light in a carefully curated, antiques-filled period environment that he ultimately decided to share with the public.
Rather than freezing the décor in one particular historical moment, Mr. Severs showed how a house would have evolved over successive generations in the hands of a single family — that of one Isaac Jervis, a fictitious Huguenot silk weaver of the sort who once populated Spitalfields. As family fortunes rose and fell, the parlor might get a Victorian face-lift, or the threadbare attic bedroom might be rented to lodgers. Heightening the ambience, the phantom family’s (recorded) rustlings and rumblings can be heard as visitors stroll among the home’s five levels. A visit is especially evocative in winter when the Monday night candlelight tours sell out and the aromas of mulled wine and spice cookies ramp up the atmosphere even further.
Such creations — the private realms and whims of inspired aesthetes put on public display — are something of a fetish in London. Indeed, house museums are to London what streetlights are to most other cities, which is to say everywhere. Perhaps in no other culture has the domestic interior served as such a canvas for personal expression. Homeowners and their architects and decorators have been emboldened to create some pretty fabulous environments over the last few centuries.
Whether visitors seek them or just happen upon them, it is worth taking the time to step inside these charming incubators of idiosyncrasy.
How else would one ever learn about Mah-Jongg, the ring-tailed lemur who in the 1930s and 40s had free reign of Eltham Palace, former home of King Henry VIII (not to mention Kings Henry IV and Henry II) near Greenwich (Court Yard, Eltham; elthampalace.org.uk). Mah-Jongg, whose second-story room at Eltham was decorated with painted scenes of bamboo forests, was the beloved pet of Stephen Courtauld, an heir to the British textile fortune, and his Italian-born wife, Virginia. They acquired the property — notable for its impressive 1470s Great Hall — in 1933 and commissioned the architects Seely and Paget to revamp the estate into a modern home suitable for their considerable entertaining needs.
Collaborating with several design firms, the architects delivered an elegant mix of styles that reflected the prevailing tastes of the day. The tone is brilliantly set in the Swedish Art Deco entry hall, designed by Rolf Engströmer and featuring a stunningly original concrete and glass dome. The room’s Australian black-bean paneling, with marquetry scenes of Venice and Stockholm (with the Courtaulds’ yacht moored in the harbor), is a showstopper. Throughout, Eltham was set up with “mod cons” (as modern conveniences were known) like an internal telephone system and a clock linked directly to the Greenwich observatory. Take a seat in the Venetian bedroom, paneled in walnut with mirrored insets, and watch the Courtaulds’ home movies of parties at home and trips around the world on their yacht. Mah-Jongg seems to have never been far from the action.
Mod cons take a back seat to the lure of the Orient at the Leighton House Museum (12 Holland Park Road; rbkc.gov.uk/leightonhousemuseum). Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-96), was one of the leading Victorian artists, known for his paintings of languid beauties like “Flaming June.” His home and studio at the edge of Holland Park in Kensington is one of the city’s most remarkable 19th-century abodes and a consummate summation of the period’s Orientalist taste. A frequent backdrop for films (like “Wings of the Dove”) and photo shoots, Leighton’s Arab Hall, showcasing his collection of more than 1,000 Islamic tiles, is among the most singular spaces in all London. The peacock-blue tiles that adorn much of the rest of the public rooms are by William De Morgan and unify the space with an air of opulence.
Begun in 1864 and expanded over subsequent decades, the whole place gleams anew as the house reopened in April after an exhaustive refurbishment designed to make it more faithful to its appearance in Leighton’s day. Displayed throughout are many of Leighton’s own works as well as those of his Victorian contemporaries like John Everett Millais, G. F. Watts and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Clearly conceived to be Leighton’s best advertisement as a tastemaker, the house enabled the artist to entertain lavishly and often. Though guests never got too comfortable, as the house has just one bedroom — Leighton’s own.
Hemmed in by the whizzing traffic of Hyde Park Corner, Apsley House, also known as the Wellington Museum (Apsley House, 149 Piccadilly; 44-207- 499-5676), might escape the attention of those shuttling between Buckingham Palace and Harrod’s, but it’s worth a stop — if only to see “Mars the Peacemaker,” Canova’s colossal marble statue of Napoleon in the stair hall. In the audio guide, the present Duke of Wellington, who still lives upstairs part time, recalls how he had to take care not to knock the little bronze statuette of Victory out of Napoleon’s hand as he slid down the banister as a child.
With Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon in the Peninsular War and finally at Waterloo, he became Britain’s greatest military M.V.P. of all time. Titles (like Duke), properties (such as this one) and trinkets galore were showered upon him like tribute to a Roman emperor. In gratitude for getting Napoleon’s brother off his throne, the Spanish King Ferdinand VII let him keep works from the royal collection like Velázquez’s “Waterseller of Seville,” which now has pride of place in an upstairs gallery. The Duke also received sets of china and silverware from the crowned heads of Europe. He used these at the annual Waterloo banquets and they are now displayed on the ground floor. The suite of public rooms upstairs provide the backdrop for Wellington’s astonishing collection of paintings. Apparently the military hero did battle with his decorators as well as French tyrants, insisting on yellow silk wall hangings in the ballroom, though they more or less killed the effects of the expensive gilding on the moldings.
Perhaps no London house museum has a more devoted fan base than Sir John Soane’s Museum (13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields; soane.org). Soane (1753-1837) was among England’s greatest architects, and he spent the last 20 years of his life expanding his home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with the purchase of two neighboring houses. He opened it to the public before he died and arranged an act of Parliament to ensure it would “be kept as nearly as possible in the state that he shall leave it.” Currently, a £6 million project is under way to put on public view the rooms that have served as offices since the house museum opened in 1837.
The Soane Museum is emblematic of a certain brand of Britishness — quirky, highly organized and utterly charming. Passageways, stairways, even Soane’s dressing room are chock full of sculptures and architectural relics and his library of more than 10,000 volumes. Soane added domes, clerestories, skylights and cleverly placed mirrors wherever he could to bring natural light to all corners of the house — even the basement.
Not to be missed is Hogarth’s famous series of paintings depicting “The Rake’s Progress,” displayed on the walls of the picture gallery. The Hogarth paintings tell the tale of a fictitious Londoner, like Severs’s invented silk weaver Jervis. This one is Tom Rakewell, whose spendthrift ways lead to penury and madness. There is an irony in finding these moralistic images of a man who lost it all hanging in the home of a man who tripled the size of his home to keep pace with his prized collections.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Thursday, December 30, 2010
For Shoppers, a TV Guide By ROY FURCHGOTT
For Shoppers, a TV Guide By ROY FURCHGOTT
WHEN most people buy a television, they measure the wall where they want to put it and then pick the largest screen that will fit. That is exactly the right way to buy a big TV, but it misses the point if you want the right TV.
The good news is that picture quality has improved radically in the last five years, even as prices have plummeted. The bad news: there are a bewildering number of specifications and features to consider. Many of them will matter only to hard-core videophiles, but some are critical to everyone.
One of the basic features is the type of set. Although projection and tube televisions are still available, most people choose either a plasma set or one of the two types of LCD televisions.
Most of the professional installers I consulted prefer plasma televisions. And if you want a flat-screen model that is wider than 50 inches, there are few other choices.
The installers say that plasma sets have the smoothest motion, the truest blacks — more on that later — and are more easily watched from side angles than the LCD variety. Moreover, “plasma is generally cheaper,” said Shawn G. DuBravac, the director of research for the Consumer Electronics Association.
But plasmas also use more energy than LCD sets — making them more expensive to run — and LCD sets can work better in bright rooms because they have higher bright settings than plasmas. “The electricity cost of powering the TV, even for the largest models, amounts to less than $2 a week,” Mr. DuBravac said. “That’s if you watch TV five hours a day, seven days a week.” The cost may not bother every customer.
There are also big differences among LCD sets. One technical distinction is that older LCD sets are backlighted by a fluorescent lamp, while the newer ones, called “LED LCDs,” are lighted by hundreds of LEDs. These models can be brighter and have a higher contrast than their older cousins, and they are thinner, too — less than an inch compared with three or so inches.
LED screens tend to have better black levels than the older LCDs. The reason: Regular LCD sets create black by closing off a crystal, but light can still leak through — think of a cloth draped over a lamp. The LED variety, with its hundreds of individual lamps, can effectively turn off the light source — that is, click off the light rather than drape a cloth over it. But even that is not perfect. Although there are hundreds of lamps, there are millions of the pixels that make up the set’s picture, so a “black” area will still have a few lighted pixels. In plasma sets, however, the cells that make up the picture are lighted individually, making its blacks better still.
Resolution — the sharpness of the picture — is a second major factor for buyers. A few years ago, there was a complex variety of choices, but there are now just two — 720p or 1080p. (These terms refer to the number of lines on the screen, with anything higher than 720 considered high definition.)
Generally, 1080 offers finer resolution at a higher price, but that is not the end of the story because television broadcasts, DVDs and Blu-ray all enter the set at different resolutions. To make the number of lines from the source match the number of lines on the set, the television must use its computing power to scale the picture, and its ultimate quality will depend on how well the set’s computer and software do their jobs.
There is no measurement for computing power. You have to rely on your eyes at the store, and maybe on experts’ and owners’ reviews. In one case, though, the 1080 is inarguably better, and that is for Blu-ray discs. They have 1,080 lines of resolution, so they can match any television bearing the same measure. To get the most from Blu-ray, however, dig deep into the owner’s manual to make sure the television set accepts a “24p” signal, (look under “allowable” or “supported” input signals). If not, even with the 1,080 match, the set will need to do more processing to convert the signal properly.
What about 3-D televisions? One downside is that the number of 3-D programs and films is sharply limited. A 3-D set is also nearly double the cost of a comparable 2-D set, and that does not include the cost of 3-D glasses, which are weightier than the old cardboard versions and cost $100 to $300.
As with many television tech issues, there is yet another twist: because 3-D requires so much processing power, the sets tend to have excellent computer processing. That capability means better pictures — even for people who use the sets only for 2-D viewing.
Unfortunately, the televisions’ computers are complex, and appraising them is not easy. Be sure to pay attention to the refresh rate. That is the speed at which the set can put up new pictures, and it affects how fluidly images move on the screen.
Video purists prefer a refresh rate of 60 hertz because it is “true” — the same rate as that of broadcast television. But on either kind of LCD set, that slow a rate can blur the motion in sports broadcasts and action movies. (“Motion blurring is not an issue” on plasma TVs, said Bill Schindler, a television engineer and researcher.)
To minimize blurring on LCD sets, many people prefer a 120-hertz refresh rate. When broadcast television sends out its 60 pictures a second, a 120-hertz set must fill in twice as many frames, guessing what a picture between the two broadcast images would look like, and then creating it. Most sets can handle a 120 rate effectively — but a 240-hertz rate can mean problems.
“There is an awful lot of interpolation going on at these higher frame rates,” Mr. Schindler said. “In the case of 240 you have to make up three pictures” for every real one received.
Moreover, the more processing required, the greater the likelihood of “artifacts” — processing mistakes that show up on the screen. A classic artifact: spokes that “appear to be going backward” on a stagecoach in a Western, said Joe Kane, a video display consultant. “If the processing isn’t very good, they appear to be going backward even worse.”
More and more televisions can be linked to the Internet, but if you plan to buy one, keep two things in mind. First, apart from the set itself, the quality of what you get will depend on your Internet speed. That may mean one more thing to upgrade. Second, as you browse, realize that the sites and services available on a Web-enabled television may change after your purchase. If a film service — Hulu or Vudu, for example — becomes more widely used, a TV maker may add it to the menu of links available. The shifting array of features makes comparison shopping difficult.
“If something is popular,” said Mr. DuBravac of the Consumer Electronics Association, “it’s going to be developed for multiple devices.”
Finally, what about the size of the set — the feature that many people deem all-important? Buyers may think they know the proper size, said Sy Paulson, a manager at the Best Buy store at Union Square in Manhattan, but their calculations are frequently “hit or miss.”
The critical factor is the distance between the viewer and the set. The rule of thumb is to take that distance — say, 60 inches — and divide by three, and the result — 20 inches — is the ideal height of the screen. (Screen height is usually about half the screen’s diagonal measure.)
With high definition, the picture will look good even close up. But if you get too close, you risk whiplash just trying to follow the action.
WHEN most people buy a television, they measure the wall where they want to put it and then pick the largest screen that will fit. That is exactly the right way to buy a big TV, but it misses the point if you want the right TV.
The good news is that picture quality has improved radically in the last five years, even as prices have plummeted. The bad news: there are a bewildering number of specifications and features to consider. Many of them will matter only to hard-core videophiles, but some are critical to everyone.
One of the basic features is the type of set. Although projection and tube televisions are still available, most people choose either a plasma set or one of the two types of LCD televisions.
Most of the professional installers I consulted prefer plasma televisions. And if you want a flat-screen model that is wider than 50 inches, there are few other choices.
The installers say that plasma sets have the smoothest motion, the truest blacks — more on that later — and are more easily watched from side angles than the LCD variety. Moreover, “plasma is generally cheaper,” said Shawn G. DuBravac, the director of research for the Consumer Electronics Association.
But plasmas also use more energy than LCD sets — making them more expensive to run — and LCD sets can work better in bright rooms because they have higher bright settings than plasmas. “The electricity cost of powering the TV, even for the largest models, amounts to less than $2 a week,” Mr. DuBravac said. “That’s if you watch TV five hours a day, seven days a week.” The cost may not bother every customer.
There are also big differences among LCD sets. One technical distinction is that older LCD sets are backlighted by a fluorescent lamp, while the newer ones, called “LED LCDs,” are lighted by hundreds of LEDs. These models can be brighter and have a higher contrast than their older cousins, and they are thinner, too — less than an inch compared with three or so inches.
LED screens tend to have better black levels than the older LCDs. The reason: Regular LCD sets create black by closing off a crystal, but light can still leak through — think of a cloth draped over a lamp. The LED variety, with its hundreds of individual lamps, can effectively turn off the light source — that is, click off the light rather than drape a cloth over it. But even that is not perfect. Although there are hundreds of lamps, there are millions of the pixels that make up the set’s picture, so a “black” area will still have a few lighted pixels. In plasma sets, however, the cells that make up the picture are lighted individually, making its blacks better still.
Resolution — the sharpness of the picture — is a second major factor for buyers. A few years ago, there was a complex variety of choices, but there are now just two — 720p or 1080p. (These terms refer to the number of lines on the screen, with anything higher than 720 considered high definition.)
Generally, 1080 offers finer resolution at a higher price, but that is not the end of the story because television broadcasts, DVDs and Blu-ray all enter the set at different resolutions. To make the number of lines from the source match the number of lines on the set, the television must use its computing power to scale the picture, and its ultimate quality will depend on how well the set’s computer and software do their jobs.
There is no measurement for computing power. You have to rely on your eyes at the store, and maybe on experts’ and owners’ reviews. In one case, though, the 1080 is inarguably better, and that is for Blu-ray discs. They have 1,080 lines of resolution, so they can match any television bearing the same measure. To get the most from Blu-ray, however, dig deep into the owner’s manual to make sure the television set accepts a “24p” signal, (look under “allowable” or “supported” input signals). If not, even with the 1,080 match, the set will need to do more processing to convert the signal properly.
What about 3-D televisions? One downside is that the number of 3-D programs and films is sharply limited. A 3-D set is also nearly double the cost of a comparable 2-D set, and that does not include the cost of 3-D glasses, which are weightier than the old cardboard versions and cost $100 to $300.
As with many television tech issues, there is yet another twist: because 3-D requires so much processing power, the sets tend to have excellent computer processing. That capability means better pictures — even for people who use the sets only for 2-D viewing.
Unfortunately, the televisions’ computers are complex, and appraising them is not easy. Be sure to pay attention to the refresh rate. That is the speed at which the set can put up new pictures, and it affects how fluidly images move on the screen.
Video purists prefer a refresh rate of 60 hertz because it is “true” — the same rate as that of broadcast television. But on either kind of LCD set, that slow a rate can blur the motion in sports broadcasts and action movies. (“Motion blurring is not an issue” on plasma TVs, said Bill Schindler, a television engineer and researcher.)
To minimize blurring on LCD sets, many people prefer a 120-hertz refresh rate. When broadcast television sends out its 60 pictures a second, a 120-hertz set must fill in twice as many frames, guessing what a picture between the two broadcast images would look like, and then creating it. Most sets can handle a 120 rate effectively — but a 240-hertz rate can mean problems.
“There is an awful lot of interpolation going on at these higher frame rates,” Mr. Schindler said. “In the case of 240 you have to make up three pictures” for every real one received.
Moreover, the more processing required, the greater the likelihood of “artifacts” — processing mistakes that show up on the screen. A classic artifact: spokes that “appear to be going backward” on a stagecoach in a Western, said Joe Kane, a video display consultant. “If the processing isn’t very good, they appear to be going backward even worse.”
More and more televisions can be linked to the Internet, but if you plan to buy one, keep two things in mind. First, apart from the set itself, the quality of what you get will depend on your Internet speed. That may mean one more thing to upgrade. Second, as you browse, realize that the sites and services available on a Web-enabled television may change after your purchase. If a film service — Hulu or Vudu, for example — becomes more widely used, a TV maker may add it to the menu of links available. The shifting array of features makes comparison shopping difficult.
“If something is popular,” said Mr. DuBravac of the Consumer Electronics Association, “it’s going to be developed for multiple devices.”
Finally, what about the size of the set — the feature that many people deem all-important? Buyers may think they know the proper size, said Sy Paulson, a manager at the Best Buy store at Union Square in Manhattan, but their calculations are frequently “hit or miss.”
The critical factor is the distance between the viewer and the set. The rule of thumb is to take that distance — say, 60 inches — and divide by three, and the result — 20 inches — is the ideal height of the screen. (Screen height is usually about half the screen’s diagonal measure.)
With high definition, the picture will look good even close up. But if you get too close, you risk whiplash just trying to follow the action.
In Search of History on a Plate By SAM SIFTON
December 30, 2010
In Search of History on a Plate By SAM SIFTON
History buffs and first-time visitors had questions this week. Send me your own dining queries via dinejournal@nytimes.com or Twitter.com/samsifton.
Q. My partner and I are students of history, particularly New York City during the World War II years. I’m a native New Yorker, so I actually got to eat at the last Automat in the city on 42nd Street and Third Avenue before it closed. I would love to take my partner to eat at a place that hasn’t changed much, in both atmosphere and cuisine, since the 1940s. Any places you recommend around the city that would satisfy our curiosity?
A. Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop, on Fifth Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets, ought to fit the bill nicely. It’s been in business since the late 1920s and has in its service, atmosphere and sandwiches something of what I imagine you’re looking for: history on a plate. Egg salad with bacon on rye, with a fountain Coke, and you’ll find yourself slipping back through the years.
When this question was posted on the Diner’s Journal blog of The New York Times, readers chimed in with their suggestions:
My father’s first meal in the U.S. when the war ended was at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal. I understand they had a fire sometime since, but they rebuilt it exactly as it was. I had the great fortune of eating there with him two decades ago, and he said it looked exactly the same. After my father died, my mother would visit my sister in New York at Thanksgiving, and I would come up from Philly that Friday for a lunch there in his honor. After my mother died, my sister and I continued the tradition. — JANA, Philadelphia
Sam, the must-have Eisenberg’s item is a chocolate egg cream. You are missing out if you haven’t tried it. — BodegaVendetta, New York
Why not have breakfast or lunch at Barney Greengrass? It’s been there forever (as have the Formica counters). and it is a real piece of New York history. Plus, the smoked fish is excellent. — rts, New York
Q. My 16-year-old niece and a school friend, both from London, will be staying with me in Greenwich Village over a weekend in February. Both are low key, sporty and fairly unhip. Where would you suggest that I take them for a Saturday evening meal? Thank you very much for your ideas.
A. Take them to Mary’s Fish Camp and introduce them to America. Or go to Otto for fancy pizza. (You could go to Arturo’s for old-school, not-fancy pizza, instead: deeply unhip.) Maybe Bianca on Bleecker Street? And cute little Jean Claude on Sullivan Street for Saturday night.
Q. What Italian restaurant would you recommend in the city for a family of 10 for dinner? We have eaten at Alto, Convivio, Al di Là, Il Mulino, Del Posto, Pó, Lupa and Babbo. Price is not an issue.
A. That’s a good position in which to find yourself! Make a reservation at Scarpetta and see how you do. Scott Conant’s the chef, a pasta wizard out of Waterbury, Conn., who cooked at Alto and L’Impero before he had a falling out with Chris Cannon, an owner of those restaurants, who then hired the chef Michael White for both properties, made one of them Convivio and, with Mr. White, opened Marea, which you should also totally try except that, well, it’s a long story spooling itself out right now in lawyers’ offices at around $700 an hour. Go to Scarpetta. Black tagliolini with lobster and minted bread crumbs!
Q. I’m coming to New York for the first time from Australia for a week at the end of January. While I can’t wait to try out some of the food experiences I’ve been reading about all these years, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by choice. Can you suggest some quintessential dining experiences for a first-timer? Despite the great state of the Aussie dollar at the moment, and because I’ll be traveling alone, I’ll probably steer clear of the high-end restaurants this time. I’m looking to spend no more than $60 a meal at the top end for dinner and will be staying in the East Village. I’m up for just about anything.
A. First time in the big town, eh? You could never leave the East Village and do well by Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar and Momofuku Ssam Bar. You should certainly have a lunch at Katz’s. Perhaps you should spend one evening tucked into a meal (and the crowd) at the Spotted Pig. Up in Midtown I like the idea of a newcomer experiencing the scene at P. J. Clarke’s. And here is one thing you should do, for sure: walk across the Brooklyn Bridge in the afternoon wearing something decent under your coat, so that you can have an early drink at the River Café before walking back to have dinner in Chinatown, at Oriental Garden.
Old Favorites and New Discoveries
ARTURO’S 106 West Houston Street, at Thompson Street, West Village; .
BARNEY GREENGRASS 541 Amsterdam Avenue, at 86th Street; (212) 724-4707, barneygreengrass.com.
BIANCA 5 Bleecker Street, between Bowery and Elizabeth Streets, Greenwich Village; (212) 260-4666, biancanyc.com.
EISENBERG’S SANDWICH SHOP 174 Fifth Avenue, between 22nd and 23rd Streets, Flatiron district; (212) 675-5096.
JACK’S LUXURY OYSTER BAR 101 Second Avenue, at Sixth Street, East Village; (212) 979-1012.
JEAN CLAUDE 137 Sullivan Street, between Prince and West Houston Streets, SoHo; (212) 475-9232.
KATZ’S DELICATESSEN 205 East Houston Street, between Ludlow and Orchard Streets, Lower East Side; (212) 254-2246, katzdeli.com.
MAREA 240 Central Park South; (212) 582-5100, marea-nyc.com.
MARY’S FISH CAMP 64 Charles Street, at West Fourth Street, West Village; (646) 486-2185, marysfishcamp.com.
MOMOFUKU SSAM BAR 207 Second Avenue, at 13th Street, East Village; (212) 777-7773, momofuku.com/ssam-bar.
ORIENTAL GARDEN 14 Elizabeth Street, between Bayard and Canal Streets, Chinatown; (212) 619-0085, orientalgardenny.com.
OTTO One Fifth Avenue, between East Eighth Street and Washington Mews, Greenwich Village; (212) 995-9559, ottopizzeria.com.
OYSTER BAR Grand Central Terminal (lower level); (212) 490-6650, oysterbarny.com.
P. J. CLARKE’S 915 Third Avenue, at 55th Street, Manhattan; (212) 317-1616, pjclarkes.com.
RIVER CAFE 1 Water Street, at the East River, Dumbo, Brooklyn; (718) 522-5200, rivercafe.com.
SCARPETTA 355 West 14th Street, meatpacking district; (212) 691-0555, scottconant.com/restaurants/scarpetta/new-york.
SPOTTED PIG 314 West 11th Street, West Village; (212) 620-0393, thespottedpig.com.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 31, 2010
An earlier version of this article misidentified Grand Central Terminal.
In Search of History on a Plate By SAM SIFTON
History buffs and first-time visitors had questions this week. Send me your own dining queries via dinejournal@nytimes.com or Twitter.com/samsifton.
Q. My partner and I are students of history, particularly New York City during the World War II years. I’m a native New Yorker, so I actually got to eat at the last Automat in the city on 42nd Street and Third Avenue before it closed. I would love to take my partner to eat at a place that hasn’t changed much, in both atmosphere and cuisine, since the 1940s. Any places you recommend around the city that would satisfy our curiosity?
A. Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop, on Fifth Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets, ought to fit the bill nicely. It’s been in business since the late 1920s and has in its service, atmosphere and sandwiches something of what I imagine you’re looking for: history on a plate. Egg salad with bacon on rye, with a fountain Coke, and you’ll find yourself slipping back through the years.
When this question was posted on the Diner’s Journal blog of The New York Times, readers chimed in with their suggestions:
My father’s first meal in the U.S. when the war ended was at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal. I understand they had a fire sometime since, but they rebuilt it exactly as it was. I had the great fortune of eating there with him two decades ago, and he said it looked exactly the same. After my father died, my mother would visit my sister in New York at Thanksgiving, and I would come up from Philly that Friday for a lunch there in his honor. After my mother died, my sister and I continued the tradition. — JANA, Philadelphia
Sam, the must-have Eisenberg’s item is a chocolate egg cream. You are missing out if you haven’t tried it. — BodegaVendetta, New York
Why not have breakfast or lunch at Barney Greengrass? It’s been there forever (as have the Formica counters). and it is a real piece of New York history. Plus, the smoked fish is excellent. — rts, New York
Q. My 16-year-old niece and a school friend, both from London, will be staying with me in Greenwich Village over a weekend in February. Both are low key, sporty and fairly unhip. Where would you suggest that I take them for a Saturday evening meal? Thank you very much for your ideas.
A. Take them to Mary’s Fish Camp and introduce them to America. Or go to Otto for fancy pizza. (You could go to Arturo’s for old-school, not-fancy pizza, instead: deeply unhip.) Maybe Bianca on Bleecker Street? And cute little Jean Claude on Sullivan Street for Saturday night.
Q. What Italian restaurant would you recommend in the city for a family of 10 for dinner? We have eaten at Alto, Convivio, Al di Là, Il Mulino, Del Posto, Pó, Lupa and Babbo. Price is not an issue.
A. That’s a good position in which to find yourself! Make a reservation at Scarpetta and see how you do. Scott Conant’s the chef, a pasta wizard out of Waterbury, Conn., who cooked at Alto and L’Impero before he had a falling out with Chris Cannon, an owner of those restaurants, who then hired the chef Michael White for both properties, made one of them Convivio and, with Mr. White, opened Marea, which you should also totally try except that, well, it’s a long story spooling itself out right now in lawyers’ offices at around $700 an hour. Go to Scarpetta. Black tagliolini with lobster and minted bread crumbs!
Q. I’m coming to New York for the first time from Australia for a week at the end of January. While I can’t wait to try out some of the food experiences I’ve been reading about all these years, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by choice. Can you suggest some quintessential dining experiences for a first-timer? Despite the great state of the Aussie dollar at the moment, and because I’ll be traveling alone, I’ll probably steer clear of the high-end restaurants this time. I’m looking to spend no more than $60 a meal at the top end for dinner and will be staying in the East Village. I’m up for just about anything.
A. First time in the big town, eh? You could never leave the East Village and do well by Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar and Momofuku Ssam Bar. You should certainly have a lunch at Katz’s. Perhaps you should spend one evening tucked into a meal (and the crowd) at the Spotted Pig. Up in Midtown I like the idea of a newcomer experiencing the scene at P. J. Clarke’s. And here is one thing you should do, for sure: walk across the Brooklyn Bridge in the afternoon wearing something decent under your coat, so that you can have an early drink at the River Café before walking back to have dinner in Chinatown, at Oriental Garden.
Old Favorites and New Discoveries
ARTURO’S 106 West Houston Street, at Thompson Street, West Village; .
BARNEY GREENGRASS 541 Amsterdam Avenue, at 86th Street; (212) 724-4707, barneygreengrass.com.
BIANCA 5 Bleecker Street, between Bowery and Elizabeth Streets, Greenwich Village; (212) 260-4666, biancanyc.com.
EISENBERG’S SANDWICH SHOP 174 Fifth Avenue, between 22nd and 23rd Streets, Flatiron district; (212) 675-5096.
JACK’S LUXURY OYSTER BAR 101 Second Avenue, at Sixth Street, East Village; (212) 979-1012.
JEAN CLAUDE 137 Sullivan Street, between Prince and West Houston Streets, SoHo; (212) 475-9232.
KATZ’S DELICATESSEN 205 East Houston Street, between Ludlow and Orchard Streets, Lower East Side; (212) 254-2246, katzdeli.com.
MAREA 240 Central Park South; (212) 582-5100, marea-nyc.com.
MARY’S FISH CAMP 64 Charles Street, at West Fourth Street, West Village; (646) 486-2185, marysfishcamp.com.
MOMOFUKU SSAM BAR 207 Second Avenue, at 13th Street, East Village; (212) 777-7773, momofuku.com/ssam-bar.
ORIENTAL GARDEN 14 Elizabeth Street, between Bayard and Canal Streets, Chinatown; (212) 619-0085, orientalgardenny.com.
OTTO One Fifth Avenue, between East Eighth Street and Washington Mews, Greenwich Village; (212) 995-9559, ottopizzeria.com.
OYSTER BAR Grand Central Terminal (lower level); (212) 490-6650, oysterbarny.com.
P. J. CLARKE’S 915 Third Avenue, at 55th Street, Manhattan; (212) 317-1616, pjclarkes.com.
RIVER CAFE 1 Water Street, at the East River, Dumbo, Brooklyn; (718) 522-5200, rivercafe.com.
SCARPETTA 355 West 14th Street, meatpacking district; (212) 691-0555, scottconant.com/restaurants/scarpetta/new-york.
SPOTTED PIG 314 West 11th Street, West Village; (212) 620-0393, thespottedpig.com.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 31, 2010
An earlier version of this article misidentified Grand Central Terminal.
Was the Glass Half Full or Half Empty for Dallas Diners in 2010? By Hanna Raskin
Sara Kerens
Goodbye, Dali. We're so sad to see you go.
Subject(s):
York Street, Il Cane Rosso, Nick Badovinus,
Avner Samuel, Sharon Hage
Was the Glass Half Full or Half Empty for Dallas Diners in 2010? By Hanna Raskin
published: December 30, 2010
With a few
days still
remaining in
December, it's
probably too
soon to
accurately
assess how 2010 will be recalled in the annals of Dallas
food. And as someone who spent the first half of the year
living in North Carolina, I'm surely not the obvious
candidate to hold forth on what happened in Dallas
County in February. But year-end summations are far too
important in the culinary news biz to be derailed by such
niggling considerations as perspective and expertise, so
let's just press on.
It's no easy thing to classify 2010 as a good or bad year for
the local food scene. Almost every event that riveted the
food community this year could represent a stride forward
or a minor setback, depending upon how you squint at it.
Should we be heartened that so many charitable fund-raisers showcased ambitious cooking—or
fret about overstretched chefs and diner fatigue? Is the proper response to the reopened Green
Room a loud cheer for the folks who bothered to resurrect an icon or a head shake-and-hang at
the futility of dwelling on the past?
Since I'd like to have it both ways (see above), I present here two different end-of-year lists, one for
optimists and one for pessimists. If you're the sort of diner who thinks servers spit in your food
and believes flavored foams are the greatest swindle ever perpetrated against the eating
public—who pays for air, anyhow?—you'll want to cozy up with the restaurant closings and chef
departures rehashed on the list of five reasons Dallas diners should brace for a lean year in 2011.
But if you're the sort of diner who tips more when your server neglects you, since she's obviously
busy, bless her heart, and gladly tries every critter organ set before you, you'll want to skip
straightaway to this year's shining edible moments, which provide five great reasons Dallas
diners can look forward to an engaging, vibrant local food scene in 2011. I know I'm rooting for
it.
The Pessimistic Dallas Eater's Take
1. Money was tight: Money may be the root of all evil, but the lack of it is the root of all troubles
in the restaurant industry: Every other bullet point on this list can be tracked back to the flagging
economy. Continued scrimping meant chefs citywide didn't have the resources or the confidence to
Rich Dad Poor Dad
Dallas
Rich Dad Poor Dad
Education FREE financial
workshops Jan. 18th - 21s
Sell Oil and Gas
Rights
Quick Cash for your royalty
or oil and gas rights.
866-644-6369
Dallas http://www.dallasobserver.com/content/printVersion/2039767/
1 of 3 1/7/2011 9:28 AM
experiment and innovate. Instead, independent restaurants aped corporate cost-cutting measures
to keep their dining rooms afloat: Kitchens dispensed with local produce, while Horne & Dekker
tried opening without an executive chef. Restaurants can't thrive when customers don't spend.
2. York Street closed: Food lovers who lamented the state of the local food movement in Dallas
could always console themselves with York Street, a bastion of the highest-quality ingredients,
creativity and elegant technique. Then chef Sharon Hage decided she was done. Citing personal
reasons, she closed the restaurant this fall, denying Dallas diners their favorite example of
locavorism and food without pretense.
3. Luxury took a nose-dive: Many diners adore Nosh, the moderately priced bistro Avner and
Celeste Samuel opened this year. But nobody would mistake the clubby restaurant for its
predecessor, Aurora, which for seven years dished out the kind of opulence that made Bear Sterns
parties seem tasteful. Turned out, the Champagne cart, foie gras and truffles weren't a good
match for a recession, so the Samuels closed Aurora. The number of Dallasites who could afford a
dinner with a four-digit price tag is minuscule, of course, but the demise of glitz and glamour is a
depressing indicator that dining's migrating from fun to functional.
4. A top chef got the boot: After the lifetime supplies of Buitoni pasta and Glad storage
containers are exhausted, after the trips to Spain and New Zealand have been taken, former
contestants on Top Chef can still lean on the love and adulation of their hometowns. Except in
Dallas, where season seven fan favorite Tiffany Derry found herself out of a job when Go Fish
Ocean Club closed suddenly. Derry wasn't the only celebrated chef who had trouble translating
fame into fortune this year, but Dallas diners' apparent lack of interest in her cooking was a sad
reflection of the community's feeble support for its culinary practitioners who've made good.
5. Theatergoers lost an after-show spot: Dali may not have been the most important
restaurant in Dallas, but the 2-year-old One Arts Plaza wine bar—which served far better food
than a Chardonnay drinker who glanced at the deceptively simple menu would ever expect
—played an important part. In addition to providing the artsy set with crab cakes before and
after operas and ballets, the restaurant helped assert the role of the culinary arts in the city's
cultural life. Its position in the arts district proved eating and drinking matter as much to a city's
intellectual vitality as paintings, sculptures and brilliantly designed buildings—until it shut down
without warning.
The Optimistic Dallas Eater's Take
1. 48 Nights was an incredible success: There's nothing wrong with raising tens of thousands
of dollars for charity, but the pop-up 48 Nights project wasn't just a fund-raiser. The guerrilla
30-seat restaurant in Oak Cliff, staffed by a rotating series of the city's biggest-name chefs, infused
the Dallas dining scene with excitement, energy and a spirit of collaboration that's critical for a
growing food community. The sold-out dinners were playful and brave and wonderful.
2. Paul Quinn College planted seeds: Paul Quinn College had a football field, but since the
beleaguered school no longer had a football team, leaders this year transformed the tract of land
into an urban farm. The Food for Good Farm is designed to grow healthy food for the
surrounding neighborhood—where produce is hard to come by—and teach entrepreneurial skills
to Paul Quinn students. But diners across the city should benefit from the expansion of the local
farming community, which has long been too scattered and fragmented to develop the
distribution networks needed to put fresh ingredients on restaurant plates or flex much political
Dallas http://www.dallasobserver.com/content/printVersion/2039767/
2 of 3 1/7/2011 9:28 AM
muscle.
3. Jay Jerrier ordered a new pizza oven: The pizzaiolo behind Il Cane Rosso is settling down
with a restaurant in Deep Ellum, for which he's ordered a very fancy Italian pizza oven. And
Jerrier's not the only producer getting geeky about culinary equipment: Oddfellows, itching to
provide a world-class coffee experience in Oak Cliff, installed a La Marzocco Strada espresso
machine, while Lockhart Smokehouse—perhaps next year's most eagerly anticipated opening
—plans to smoke its meat in a Bewley wood-fired pit. Such commitment to quality and craft
means better eating for everyone.
4. Neighborhood Services opened and opened and...: Nick Badovinus spun-off Neighborhood
Services twice this year, setting up the schmoozy Tavern on Henderson Avenue and pitchperfect
Bar & Grill in north Dallas. What makes the restaurants notable—other than the highly
praised veal schnitzel—is the warm service and real neighborhood feel that's eluded so many
Dallas restaurants. The success of Neighborhood Services bodes extremely well for eateries that
connect with their guests and serve honest food.
5. The cocktail scene got all stirred up: When Jason Kosmas, the revered barkeep who this
year relocated to Dallas, offered a cocktail seminar for fellow pros last year, 10 people showed up.
This year, there were nearly 40 bartenders in attendance. Local bartenders are getting serious
about fresh ingredients, authenticity, technique, flavor and making Dallas a destination for the
nation's drinkers. And where bartenders go, chefs are sure to follow.
Dallas http://www.dallasobserver.com/content/printVersion/2039767/
3 of 3 1/7/2011 9:28 AM
Goodbye, Dali. We're so sad to see you go.
Subject(s):
York Street, Il Cane Rosso, Nick Badovinus,
Avner Samuel, Sharon Hage
Was the Glass Half Full or Half Empty for Dallas Diners in 2010? By Hanna Raskin
published: December 30, 2010
With a few
days still
remaining in
December, it's
probably too
soon to
accurately
assess how 2010 will be recalled in the annals of Dallas
food. And as someone who spent the first half of the year
living in North Carolina, I'm surely not the obvious
candidate to hold forth on what happened in Dallas
County in February. But year-end summations are far too
important in the culinary news biz to be derailed by such
niggling considerations as perspective and expertise, so
let's just press on.
It's no easy thing to classify 2010 as a good or bad year for
the local food scene. Almost every event that riveted the
food community this year could represent a stride forward
or a minor setback, depending upon how you squint at it.
Should we be heartened that so many charitable fund-raisers showcased ambitious cooking—or
fret about overstretched chefs and diner fatigue? Is the proper response to the reopened Green
Room a loud cheer for the folks who bothered to resurrect an icon or a head shake-and-hang at
the futility of dwelling on the past?
Since I'd like to have it both ways (see above), I present here two different end-of-year lists, one for
optimists and one for pessimists. If you're the sort of diner who thinks servers spit in your food
and believes flavored foams are the greatest swindle ever perpetrated against the eating
public—who pays for air, anyhow?—you'll want to cozy up with the restaurant closings and chef
departures rehashed on the list of five reasons Dallas diners should brace for a lean year in 2011.
But if you're the sort of diner who tips more when your server neglects you, since she's obviously
busy, bless her heart, and gladly tries every critter organ set before you, you'll want to skip
straightaway to this year's shining edible moments, which provide five great reasons Dallas
diners can look forward to an engaging, vibrant local food scene in 2011. I know I'm rooting for
it.
The Pessimistic Dallas Eater's Take
1. Money was tight: Money may be the root of all evil, but the lack of it is the root of all troubles
in the restaurant industry: Every other bullet point on this list can be tracked back to the flagging
economy. Continued scrimping meant chefs citywide didn't have the resources or the confidence to
Rich Dad Poor Dad
Dallas
Rich Dad Poor Dad
Education FREE financial
workshops Jan. 18th - 21s
Sell Oil and Gas
Rights
Quick Cash for your royalty
or oil and gas rights.
866-644-6369
Dallas http://www.dallasobserver.com/content/printVersion/2039767/
1 of 3 1/7/2011 9:28 AM
experiment and innovate. Instead, independent restaurants aped corporate cost-cutting measures
to keep their dining rooms afloat: Kitchens dispensed with local produce, while Horne & Dekker
tried opening without an executive chef. Restaurants can't thrive when customers don't spend.
2. York Street closed: Food lovers who lamented the state of the local food movement in Dallas
could always console themselves with York Street, a bastion of the highest-quality ingredients,
creativity and elegant technique. Then chef Sharon Hage decided she was done. Citing personal
reasons, she closed the restaurant this fall, denying Dallas diners their favorite example of
locavorism and food without pretense.
3. Luxury took a nose-dive: Many diners adore Nosh, the moderately priced bistro Avner and
Celeste Samuel opened this year. But nobody would mistake the clubby restaurant for its
predecessor, Aurora, which for seven years dished out the kind of opulence that made Bear Sterns
parties seem tasteful. Turned out, the Champagne cart, foie gras and truffles weren't a good
match for a recession, so the Samuels closed Aurora. The number of Dallasites who could afford a
dinner with a four-digit price tag is minuscule, of course, but the demise of glitz and glamour is a
depressing indicator that dining's migrating from fun to functional.
4. A top chef got the boot: After the lifetime supplies of Buitoni pasta and Glad storage
containers are exhausted, after the trips to Spain and New Zealand have been taken, former
contestants on Top Chef can still lean on the love and adulation of their hometowns. Except in
Dallas, where season seven fan favorite Tiffany Derry found herself out of a job when Go Fish
Ocean Club closed suddenly. Derry wasn't the only celebrated chef who had trouble translating
fame into fortune this year, but Dallas diners' apparent lack of interest in her cooking was a sad
reflection of the community's feeble support for its culinary practitioners who've made good.
5. Theatergoers lost an after-show spot: Dali may not have been the most important
restaurant in Dallas, but the 2-year-old One Arts Plaza wine bar—which served far better food
than a Chardonnay drinker who glanced at the deceptively simple menu would ever expect
—played an important part. In addition to providing the artsy set with crab cakes before and
after operas and ballets, the restaurant helped assert the role of the culinary arts in the city's
cultural life. Its position in the arts district proved eating and drinking matter as much to a city's
intellectual vitality as paintings, sculptures and brilliantly designed buildings—until it shut down
without warning.
The Optimistic Dallas Eater's Take
1. 48 Nights was an incredible success: There's nothing wrong with raising tens of thousands
of dollars for charity, but the pop-up 48 Nights project wasn't just a fund-raiser. The guerrilla
30-seat restaurant in Oak Cliff, staffed by a rotating series of the city's biggest-name chefs, infused
the Dallas dining scene with excitement, energy and a spirit of collaboration that's critical for a
growing food community. The sold-out dinners were playful and brave and wonderful.
2. Paul Quinn College planted seeds: Paul Quinn College had a football field, but since the
beleaguered school no longer had a football team, leaders this year transformed the tract of land
into an urban farm. The Food for Good Farm is designed to grow healthy food for the
surrounding neighborhood—where produce is hard to come by—and teach entrepreneurial skills
to Paul Quinn students. But diners across the city should benefit from the expansion of the local
farming community, which has long been too scattered and fragmented to develop the
distribution networks needed to put fresh ingredients on restaurant plates or flex much political
Dallas http://www.dallasobserver.com/content/printVersion/2039767/
2 of 3 1/7/2011 9:28 AM
muscle.
3. Jay Jerrier ordered a new pizza oven: The pizzaiolo behind Il Cane Rosso is settling down
with a restaurant in Deep Ellum, for which he's ordered a very fancy Italian pizza oven. And
Jerrier's not the only producer getting geeky about culinary equipment: Oddfellows, itching to
provide a world-class coffee experience in Oak Cliff, installed a La Marzocco Strada espresso
machine, while Lockhart Smokehouse—perhaps next year's most eagerly anticipated opening
—plans to smoke its meat in a Bewley wood-fired pit. Such commitment to quality and craft
means better eating for everyone.
4. Neighborhood Services opened and opened and...: Nick Badovinus spun-off Neighborhood
Services twice this year, setting up the schmoozy Tavern on Henderson Avenue and pitchperfect
Bar & Grill in north Dallas. What makes the restaurants notable—other than the highly
praised veal schnitzel—is the warm service and real neighborhood feel that's eluded so many
Dallas restaurants. The success of Neighborhood Services bodes extremely well for eateries that
connect with their guests and serve honest food.
5. The cocktail scene got all stirred up: When Jason Kosmas, the revered barkeep who this
year relocated to Dallas, offered a cocktail seminar for fellow pros last year, 10 people showed up.
This year, there were nearly 40 bartenders in attendance. Local bartenders are getting serious
about fresh ingredients, authenticity, technique, flavor and making Dallas a destination for the
nation's drinkers. And where bartenders go, chefs are sure to follow.
Dallas http://www.dallasobserver.com/content/printVersion/2039767/
3 of 3 1/7/2011 9:28 AM
Landscapes and Still Lifes of New Territories By ROBERTA SMITH
December 30, 2010
Landscapes and Still Lifes of New Territories By ROBERTA SMITH
FAVORITE paintings in New York museums? You don’t have to be an art critic to have a few, or a few dozen. Winnowing these treasures down to five — the assignment here for three critics for The New York Times — is a pleasant, invigorating yet implicitly arbitrary endeavor. The resulting lists can only be characterized conditionally, as personal, partial or provisional.
All told the city offers one of the world’s great accounts of the medium. The paintings selected here range from Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert,” from 1480, in the Frick Collection to “Do the Dance,” from 2005, by Elizabeth Murray in the Museum of Modern Art. (The choices are on Pages 26 through 28.)
Paintings, like poetry or music, are essential nutrients that help people sustain healthy lives. They’re not recreational pleasures or sidelines. They are tools that help us grasp the diversity of the world and its history, and explore the emotional capacities with which we navigate that world. They illuminate, they humble, they nurture, they inspire. They teach us to use our eyes and to know ourselves by knowing others.
If New York’s legions of irresistible paintings could sing, these hills would be magnificently alive with the sound of their music.
‘GREEN STILL LIFE,’ BY PICASSO, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART One requisite for “favorite painting” status would seem to be an irrational, mood-boosting thrill each time you see it. Even by that standard my soft spot for this popular Synthetic Cubist Picasso is especially spongy.
I looked at it regularly before I had any inking of Picasso, Cubism or the Museum of Modern Art (which received it as a bequest from one of its founders, Lillie P. Bliss, in 1934). Or at least I looked at a handsome, possibly full-size reproduction, stylishly framed in white, that hung in my parents’ house in Lawrence, Kan. The facsimile even hinted at, I think, some of the bumpiness fanning out from the white, darkly shadowed compote dish that is one of its central elements. Its reworked roughness could be signs of an earlier composition painted over. Still, Picasso made the best of it, eventually reinforcing the turbulence with radiating dashes of color that first scale the neck of the wine bottle that is the compote’s consort and then scatter beyond.
Picasso painted “Green Still Life” in the summer of 1914 in Avignon, after ushering the interlocking planes of his Analytic Cubist paintings into robust three dimensions with his various guitar sculptures. Robustness prevails here too, in the solid, flat green field that is about as close as Picasso gets to the modernist monochrome. It can be read as a response to Matisse’s “Red Studio” of 1911, especially as it hangs just a few galleries away at the Modern.
But in the main, “Green Still Life” shows Picasso relaxing into Synthetic Cubism’s flirtier, simpler compositions, brighter colors and Pointillist dots, which in this case intimate table runners and a spider web catching the yellow light. The letters J O U, a Cubist staple, are further away from “Journal” (French for newspaper) and closer to “jouer” (to play) or “jou-jou” (child’s toy) than ever. Fancifully shaped and stippled in black and white, they actually seem carved into a little block.
Other visual witticisms include the outline of a pear that contains a bit of lovingly exact pear flesh, a large bristling orb that might be a pineapple or artichoke, a cut-glass vessel and a hand wrapped around a grenade. It is the summer of 1914; World War I is just getting under way.
‘HEAT,’ BY FLORINE STETTHEIMER, BROOKLYN MUSEUM The Brooklyn Museum has the city’s best painting by the eccentric if thoroughly modern Florine Stettheimer, a greater artist than Georgia O’Keeffe. It is “Heat” (1919), a smoldering flaglike field of wide bands of orange, deep yellow and olive green dotted with the figures of Stettheimer, her sisters Ettie, Carrie and Stella and their revered mother, Rosetta. It was painted in 1919, the year Stettheimer turned 48 and was at the peak of her strange powers as an artist.
These powers revolved around an unwavering faith in saturated color laid on thickly, and a slightly wicked gift for caricature. Perched on the steeply banked color bands, the women are arrayed in a circle. In the foreground is a lighted birthday cake set on a table whose oval top is one of the few concessions to spatial recession, although the foreshortening mainly serves to fuse cake and tabletop into a very large eye that adds to the painting’s mesmerizing power. The Stettheimers are enduring the summer heat in different ways, while also enacting varying states of consciousness: limp collapse, wakening, sitting up and finally conversing with Mama, who wears head-to-toe Victorian black and appears to be fully alert. A kind of life cycle, perhaps, with death at the top.
Private wealth ensured Florine Stettheimer a genteel, uncompromised life. She declined to have solo shows during her lifetime (despite the enthusiasm of artist friends like Marcel Duchamp and Hilla Rebay and the critic Henry McBride). She disliked selling her work. The capsule about “Heat” on the Brooklyn Museum’s Web site begins with her observation that “letting people have your paintings is like letting them wear your clothes.” This statement hints at something of the iron butterfly that you sense in the merciless color and tactility of “Heat,” not to mention the suggestion of an inverted, probably male torso in the black tree visible in the background.
One indication of a painting’s staying power is its ability to function like a two-sided mirror, showing parts of both the past and future of painting side by side. “Heat” looks back to the languid fetes of Watteau (as the art historian Barbara Bloemink has pointed out) and the solid colors of the Italian primitives, and forward to two artists rarely mentioned in the same sentence: Mark Rothko and Tim Burton.
‘MORNING IN THE VILLAGE AFTER SNOWSTORM,’ BY MALEVICH, GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM Like so many works from the 1910s Malevich’s “Morning in the Village After Snowstorm” (1912) hovers deliciously between abstraction and representation, object and image, imagined and perceived.
Within two years of assembling this gleaming, scalloped vortex of snow drifts, peasants, houses and trees, Malevich would bring forth what is generally considered Western painting’s first pure abstraction, the first of his “Black Square” compositions, which he set against a field of white and described as a “full void.” In the Guggenheim painting we sense the fullness of his mystical void as an approaching whiteout, a kind of blazing light that threatens to burn away image. Strictly speaking, this would leave us with something closer to his “Suprematist Composition: White on White” of 1918, the tilting kitelike square of cool white on a slightly warmer white ground in the Museum of Modern Art.
In the meantime “Morning” ravishes the eye with its sparkling facets of red, blue, black and tan, shaded to white. The gaze moves through the scene like an icebreaker. The forms heave to either side, nearly filling the available space but leaving a narrow path to a tiny figure pulling a sled in the distance. One-point perspective and the Renaissance notion of the picture plane as a window are bid fond farewell.
Among the crowning achievements of that marvelous Russian mongrel Cubo-Futurism, “Morning” has Malevich both scaling up and calming down Cézanne’s anxious cylinders, spheres and especially cones to the point of majesty. Malevich then enlists them to render country life as he knew it from his childhood, a return to roots that proved similarly effective for other early modernist painters, including Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Chagall and, as we shall see, Miró.
The smoothness of Malevich’s paint application adds to the forms’ metallic sheen. We are in the world of Dorothy’s Tin Man, a realm in which, if you cast the mind forward a bit, you can imagine both the metal Minimalist boxes of Donald Judd and the fluorescent glow of Dan Flavin’s light installations.
‘VINES AND OLIVE TREES, TARRAGONA,’ BY MIRó, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART Before Miró cut loose with his well-known improvisations of balloon forms, raw, washy colors and meandering automatist lines, he was a wonderfully fussy painter. His strength lay in tightening and tweaking reality a little beyond the real, creating a sharp and exacting artifice that brought the decorative, the abstract and the natural into perfect harmony. “Vines and Olive Trees, Tarragona” was painted in 1919, the year before Miró left Barcelona for Paris. Although he was certainly no stranger to the latest modernist styles, it shows him considering them at a remove in a sequence of contrasting landscape treatments that celebrates nature’s bounty.
Miró’s subject is the countryside near Tarragona, Spain, south of Barcelona and not far from his parents’ farm in Montroig, terrain he knew well and clearly loved. The composition proceeds like a succession of stage flats, different yet connected, beginning with the parallel bands of sun-baked furrows running across the bottom of the picture, where young vines are cradled in freshly dug, impossibly consistent holes. Their feathery leaves are attached to twigs of a calligraphic angularity that brings to mind wrought iron.
In the next tier — or field — the furrows pivot toward the horizon, but they don’t get far. Instead they erupt into accordionlike pleats, with locked-together edges that are alternately jagged or curvaceous (and anticipate Matisse’s cutouts) and flat, bright colors of blue-green, dark pink and yellow, a kind of naturalized version of the primary colors.
A series of tilting geometric shapes — studded with the Pointillist dots of Synthetic Cubism — follows, suggesting village roofs. Then, with the dots continuing, and accompanied by spike-leafed plants suggesting yuccas, the olive trees start up. Their cotton-ball shapes blend into a level, oceanlike mass on the left, while on the right, a single tree rises above all else, its sinuous branches and leaves performing a kind of fan dance that causes other trees to follow suit into the distance.
Finally, at the farthest reaches of the painting, a soft, lavender of mountains is visible in the haze, a parting tribute to Impressionism. This gentle fade makes you all the more aware of the carefully orchestrated cacophony that has brought you there. Now nearly 100 years old, this work is a relative newcomer to the ranks of New York’s painting gems, having arrived at the Met as part of the Gelman Collection in 1998. Welcome.
‘DO THE DANCE,’ BY ELIZABETH MURRAY, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Elizabeth Murray’s “Do the Dance” is a late painting, made in 2005 after she had received the diagnosis of the brain cancer that would kill her two years hence, at 66. Made of five separate shaped canvases that create the illusion of scores of individual smaller canvases percolating momentarily into a rectangular cluster, it is obliquely autobiographical, as all convincing art probably must be to some extent. Most of Murray’s paintings can be read as tallies of both the private emotions and events of her life and of the visual sources that fed her art throughout her career. Her vocabulary was built on elements from the work of Braque, Picasso, Miró and Malevich, as well as Jim Nutt and R. Crumb.
Like my other choices here “Do the Dance” operates in the lavishly appointed gap between the actual and the abstract. In its lower-left corner we see a character familiar from earlier Murrays — a rubbery Gumby figure whose limbs stretch into ribbonlike extensions. This figure is now apparently the patient, attached to a light-green IV, lying on white and yellow sheets whose red-flecked patterns discreetly evoke blood. Near its head a small four-pronged shape resembles a rubber glove, yet its cartoony, splatlike silhouette is one that recurs throughout Murray’s art, as spilled coffee, for example. (The hospital, like everywhere else, seems to have brimmed with expressive potential for her.)
Just above the brown figure a series of white round canvases connected by a blue laddered line that might be a spinal column or a sutured incision implies another figure. This one’s head is crisscrossed with red lines and attached to an oxygen tube. On the right half of the painting two baggy, biomorphic shapes — one yellow, one lavender — occupy their own irregular canvases; they form a couple struggling to stay connected while closely resembling examples of Murray’s earlier work. So does an undulant cloud of purple-brown, punctuated by a white dotted line. Other irregular, bulbous lines snake and coil among and around these larger shapes, suggesting tubes, wiring or cords of synaptic nodes.
At the bottom of it all, in the form of a long blue squiggle, lie the waters of Manhattan. “Do the Dance,” Murray tells us, when the end is near. The dance is life. And life, for her, was painting.
Landscapes and Still Lifes of New Territories By ROBERTA SMITH
FAVORITE paintings in New York museums? You don’t have to be an art critic to have a few, or a few dozen. Winnowing these treasures down to five — the assignment here for three critics for The New York Times — is a pleasant, invigorating yet implicitly arbitrary endeavor. The resulting lists can only be characterized conditionally, as personal, partial or provisional.
All told the city offers one of the world’s great accounts of the medium. The paintings selected here range from Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert,” from 1480, in the Frick Collection to “Do the Dance,” from 2005, by Elizabeth Murray in the Museum of Modern Art. (The choices are on Pages 26 through 28.)
Paintings, like poetry or music, are essential nutrients that help people sustain healthy lives. They’re not recreational pleasures or sidelines. They are tools that help us grasp the diversity of the world and its history, and explore the emotional capacities with which we navigate that world. They illuminate, they humble, they nurture, they inspire. They teach us to use our eyes and to know ourselves by knowing others.
If New York’s legions of irresistible paintings could sing, these hills would be magnificently alive with the sound of their music.
‘GREEN STILL LIFE,’ BY PICASSO, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART One requisite for “favorite painting” status would seem to be an irrational, mood-boosting thrill each time you see it. Even by that standard my soft spot for this popular Synthetic Cubist Picasso is especially spongy.
I looked at it regularly before I had any inking of Picasso, Cubism or the Museum of Modern Art (which received it as a bequest from one of its founders, Lillie P. Bliss, in 1934). Or at least I looked at a handsome, possibly full-size reproduction, stylishly framed in white, that hung in my parents’ house in Lawrence, Kan. The facsimile even hinted at, I think, some of the bumpiness fanning out from the white, darkly shadowed compote dish that is one of its central elements. Its reworked roughness could be signs of an earlier composition painted over. Still, Picasso made the best of it, eventually reinforcing the turbulence with radiating dashes of color that first scale the neck of the wine bottle that is the compote’s consort and then scatter beyond.
Picasso painted “Green Still Life” in the summer of 1914 in Avignon, after ushering the interlocking planes of his Analytic Cubist paintings into robust three dimensions with his various guitar sculptures. Robustness prevails here too, in the solid, flat green field that is about as close as Picasso gets to the modernist monochrome. It can be read as a response to Matisse’s “Red Studio” of 1911, especially as it hangs just a few galleries away at the Modern.
But in the main, “Green Still Life” shows Picasso relaxing into Synthetic Cubism’s flirtier, simpler compositions, brighter colors and Pointillist dots, which in this case intimate table runners and a spider web catching the yellow light. The letters J O U, a Cubist staple, are further away from “Journal” (French for newspaper) and closer to “jouer” (to play) or “jou-jou” (child’s toy) than ever. Fancifully shaped and stippled in black and white, they actually seem carved into a little block.
Other visual witticisms include the outline of a pear that contains a bit of lovingly exact pear flesh, a large bristling orb that might be a pineapple or artichoke, a cut-glass vessel and a hand wrapped around a grenade. It is the summer of 1914; World War I is just getting under way.
‘HEAT,’ BY FLORINE STETTHEIMER, BROOKLYN MUSEUM The Brooklyn Museum has the city’s best painting by the eccentric if thoroughly modern Florine Stettheimer, a greater artist than Georgia O’Keeffe. It is “Heat” (1919), a smoldering flaglike field of wide bands of orange, deep yellow and olive green dotted with the figures of Stettheimer, her sisters Ettie, Carrie and Stella and their revered mother, Rosetta. It was painted in 1919, the year Stettheimer turned 48 and was at the peak of her strange powers as an artist.
These powers revolved around an unwavering faith in saturated color laid on thickly, and a slightly wicked gift for caricature. Perched on the steeply banked color bands, the women are arrayed in a circle. In the foreground is a lighted birthday cake set on a table whose oval top is one of the few concessions to spatial recession, although the foreshortening mainly serves to fuse cake and tabletop into a very large eye that adds to the painting’s mesmerizing power. The Stettheimers are enduring the summer heat in different ways, while also enacting varying states of consciousness: limp collapse, wakening, sitting up and finally conversing with Mama, who wears head-to-toe Victorian black and appears to be fully alert. A kind of life cycle, perhaps, with death at the top.
Private wealth ensured Florine Stettheimer a genteel, uncompromised life. She declined to have solo shows during her lifetime (despite the enthusiasm of artist friends like Marcel Duchamp and Hilla Rebay and the critic Henry McBride). She disliked selling her work. The capsule about “Heat” on the Brooklyn Museum’s Web site begins with her observation that “letting people have your paintings is like letting them wear your clothes.” This statement hints at something of the iron butterfly that you sense in the merciless color and tactility of “Heat,” not to mention the suggestion of an inverted, probably male torso in the black tree visible in the background.
One indication of a painting’s staying power is its ability to function like a two-sided mirror, showing parts of both the past and future of painting side by side. “Heat” looks back to the languid fetes of Watteau (as the art historian Barbara Bloemink has pointed out) and the solid colors of the Italian primitives, and forward to two artists rarely mentioned in the same sentence: Mark Rothko and Tim Burton.
‘MORNING IN THE VILLAGE AFTER SNOWSTORM,’ BY MALEVICH, GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM Like so many works from the 1910s Malevich’s “Morning in the Village After Snowstorm” (1912) hovers deliciously between abstraction and representation, object and image, imagined and perceived.
Within two years of assembling this gleaming, scalloped vortex of snow drifts, peasants, houses and trees, Malevich would bring forth what is generally considered Western painting’s first pure abstraction, the first of his “Black Square” compositions, which he set against a field of white and described as a “full void.” In the Guggenheim painting we sense the fullness of his mystical void as an approaching whiteout, a kind of blazing light that threatens to burn away image. Strictly speaking, this would leave us with something closer to his “Suprematist Composition: White on White” of 1918, the tilting kitelike square of cool white on a slightly warmer white ground in the Museum of Modern Art.
In the meantime “Morning” ravishes the eye with its sparkling facets of red, blue, black and tan, shaded to white. The gaze moves through the scene like an icebreaker. The forms heave to either side, nearly filling the available space but leaving a narrow path to a tiny figure pulling a sled in the distance. One-point perspective and the Renaissance notion of the picture plane as a window are bid fond farewell.
Among the crowning achievements of that marvelous Russian mongrel Cubo-Futurism, “Morning” has Malevich both scaling up and calming down Cézanne’s anxious cylinders, spheres and especially cones to the point of majesty. Malevich then enlists them to render country life as he knew it from his childhood, a return to roots that proved similarly effective for other early modernist painters, including Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Chagall and, as we shall see, Miró.
The smoothness of Malevich’s paint application adds to the forms’ metallic sheen. We are in the world of Dorothy’s Tin Man, a realm in which, if you cast the mind forward a bit, you can imagine both the metal Minimalist boxes of Donald Judd and the fluorescent glow of Dan Flavin’s light installations.
‘VINES AND OLIVE TREES, TARRAGONA,’ BY MIRó, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART Before Miró cut loose with his well-known improvisations of balloon forms, raw, washy colors and meandering automatist lines, he was a wonderfully fussy painter. His strength lay in tightening and tweaking reality a little beyond the real, creating a sharp and exacting artifice that brought the decorative, the abstract and the natural into perfect harmony. “Vines and Olive Trees, Tarragona” was painted in 1919, the year before Miró left Barcelona for Paris. Although he was certainly no stranger to the latest modernist styles, it shows him considering them at a remove in a sequence of contrasting landscape treatments that celebrates nature’s bounty.
Miró’s subject is the countryside near Tarragona, Spain, south of Barcelona and not far from his parents’ farm in Montroig, terrain he knew well and clearly loved. The composition proceeds like a succession of stage flats, different yet connected, beginning with the parallel bands of sun-baked furrows running across the bottom of the picture, where young vines are cradled in freshly dug, impossibly consistent holes. Their feathery leaves are attached to twigs of a calligraphic angularity that brings to mind wrought iron.
In the next tier — or field — the furrows pivot toward the horizon, but they don’t get far. Instead they erupt into accordionlike pleats, with locked-together edges that are alternately jagged or curvaceous (and anticipate Matisse’s cutouts) and flat, bright colors of blue-green, dark pink and yellow, a kind of naturalized version of the primary colors.
A series of tilting geometric shapes — studded with the Pointillist dots of Synthetic Cubism — follows, suggesting village roofs. Then, with the dots continuing, and accompanied by spike-leafed plants suggesting yuccas, the olive trees start up. Their cotton-ball shapes blend into a level, oceanlike mass on the left, while on the right, a single tree rises above all else, its sinuous branches and leaves performing a kind of fan dance that causes other trees to follow suit into the distance.
Finally, at the farthest reaches of the painting, a soft, lavender of mountains is visible in the haze, a parting tribute to Impressionism. This gentle fade makes you all the more aware of the carefully orchestrated cacophony that has brought you there. Now nearly 100 years old, this work is a relative newcomer to the ranks of New York’s painting gems, having arrived at the Met as part of the Gelman Collection in 1998. Welcome.
‘DO THE DANCE,’ BY ELIZABETH MURRAY, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Elizabeth Murray’s “Do the Dance” is a late painting, made in 2005 after she had received the diagnosis of the brain cancer that would kill her two years hence, at 66. Made of five separate shaped canvases that create the illusion of scores of individual smaller canvases percolating momentarily into a rectangular cluster, it is obliquely autobiographical, as all convincing art probably must be to some extent. Most of Murray’s paintings can be read as tallies of both the private emotions and events of her life and of the visual sources that fed her art throughout her career. Her vocabulary was built on elements from the work of Braque, Picasso, Miró and Malevich, as well as Jim Nutt and R. Crumb.
Like my other choices here “Do the Dance” operates in the lavishly appointed gap between the actual and the abstract. In its lower-left corner we see a character familiar from earlier Murrays — a rubbery Gumby figure whose limbs stretch into ribbonlike extensions. This figure is now apparently the patient, attached to a light-green IV, lying on white and yellow sheets whose red-flecked patterns discreetly evoke blood. Near its head a small four-pronged shape resembles a rubber glove, yet its cartoony, splatlike silhouette is one that recurs throughout Murray’s art, as spilled coffee, for example. (The hospital, like everywhere else, seems to have brimmed with expressive potential for her.)
Just above the brown figure a series of white round canvases connected by a blue laddered line that might be a spinal column or a sutured incision implies another figure. This one’s head is crisscrossed with red lines and attached to an oxygen tube. On the right half of the painting two baggy, biomorphic shapes — one yellow, one lavender — occupy their own irregular canvases; they form a couple struggling to stay connected while closely resembling examples of Murray’s earlier work. So does an undulant cloud of purple-brown, punctuated by a white dotted line. Other irregular, bulbous lines snake and coil among and around these larger shapes, suggesting tubes, wiring or cords of synaptic nodes.
At the bottom of it all, in the form of a long blue squiggle, lie the waters of Manhattan. “Do the Dance,” Murray tells us, when the end is near. The dance is life. And life, for her, was painting.
Overlooked Works That Deserve Another Glance By KAREN ROSENBERG
December 30, 2010
Overlooked Works That Deserve Another Glance By KAREN ROSENBERG
‘MANUEL OSORIO MANRIQUE DE ZUÑIGA,’ BY GOYA, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART There’s a reason that this painting is one of the first you see when you walk up the Met’s main staircase, pass through the heavy glass doors into European Paintings, and turn right (as museumgoers invariably do). It isn’t just the color — an arresting tomato red against green-gray — or the adorably precocious subject, the third son of the count of Altamira. It’s the unsettling way in which Goya complicates 18th-century ideas about childhood.
The small brown-eyed boy, the caged finches, the magpie on a leash and the predatory cats (who reappear as feral monstrosities in Goya’s “Caprichos”) lend themselves to different, and contradictory, readings. You can look at this painting (possibly from the 1790s) and see a careless kid about to lose a pet, or you can see the light-haloed Manuel as a magical innocent. (More than one art historian has compared him to the Christ child.) Either way, you sense “Goya’s awareness of how contingent life is,” to quote the critic Robert Hughes.
That awareness is certainly heightened by the fact that Manuel never lived to see adulthood (he died in 1792, and it’s thought that the portrait may be a memorial) and by our knowledge of Goya’s own losses. (At least seven of his offspring died in infancy.) Although the dark mood of later Goya is much in evidence here, the painting has talismanic properties, as if the image of Manuel could somehow warn or protect other children.
Goya painted other members of the Altamira family, though not with as much intensity. His portrait of the countess — shown seated and expressionless in a pale pink satin dress, balancing Manuel’s baby sister on her lap — is at the Met too, in the Lehman Wing. And Manuel has a not-too-distant cousin in Manet’s “Boy With a Sword,” also at the museum, another poker-faced youth toting some very adult baggage.
‘ST. FRANCIS IN THE DESERT,’ BY GIOVANNI BELLINI, THE FRICK COLLECTION This transfixing figure in a landscape stands up to a formidable squad of portraits — two Titians, two Holbeins and an El Greco — in the Frick’s Living Hall. The painting’s subject is a matter of some debate, but it is most likely St. Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata on Mount Alverna. (Note the red marks on his hands.) Unquestionably the work, from 1480, links nature and religious ecstasy in ways that would be familiar to 19th- and 20th-century artists like Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Cole and Charles Burchfield.
The saint, emerging from a cavelike shelter into brilliant sunshine, stands on a precipice in the foreground. His torso inclines in a near-perfect echo of the laurel tree at the upper left corner. Behind him a rabbit, a heron, a donkey and a flock of sheep find footholds in the hilly Tuscan landscape, which retains its crystalline level of focus as it zigs and zags into the far distance.
His expression is wonderfully ambiguous. Is he joyous? Wary? Awestruck? Or, as some scholars have suggested, might he be singing hymns?
Those who wish to can spend days parsing the painting’s symbolism: the sandals, the skull, the little spout of water. (Even the rock formations are said to allude to specific elements of Franciscan literature.) But I’d much rather linger over the shimmering blue-gold surfaces and creeping light. Apparently the Frick’s conservators would too; last March and April they removed the Bellini for close study with x-radiographs, microscopes and other instruments. Their findings will be revealed this spring at a “dossier” exhibition in the Oval Room.
In the meantime Bellini’s “St. Francis” is a refuge within the Frick. It absorbs the withering stares of El Greco’s “St. Jerome” and Holbein’s “Sir Thomas More,” across the room, and deflects the seductive vanity and materialism of the Titians on either side. It’s hard to think of another painting that would be up to the task.
‘THE SEA,’ BY COURBET, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART This pint-size painting, from 1873, hangs in a gallery with larger, more important Courbets like the Salon painting “Woman With a Parrot.” It’s one of the many seascapes, or “marines,” he made in the 1860s and ’70s: a body of work many critics have dismissed as representing the more conventional, and marketable, side of this rebellious Realist. But for some reason I can’t get enough of it.
It’s a Janus of a painting, saluting the Romanticism of Turner and Géricault while hailing a nascent Impressionism. Courbet started to make seascapes like this one in the mid-1860s; Monet’s “Impression: Sunrise,” considered the movement’s inaugural work, dates from 1872.
Courbet’s sea, though, is more salt and grit than light and air. He called his seascapes “sea landscapes,” an apt description given the solidity of the water. He made liberal use of the palette knife, not just in the sandy strip of foreground but also along the wave crests. The painting’s insistent materiality incites covetousness, in defiance of its vast and unpossessable subject.
At the same time the sea and the sky seem to belong to two different pictures. Art historians think Courbet might have been looking at photographs of the ocean made by Gustave Le Gray and others that were sometimes printed from two negatives with different exposure times. The painting has a similarly eerie split along the horizon, with its distant but fast-charging clouds that don’t seem — yet — to have teased the waves to significant heights.
In that sky, and along those whitecaps, you can see modernism gathering force: Marsden Hartley, maybe even Rothko and Brice Marden. But a big part of the painting’s appeal is Courbet’s particular brand of nervy Realism. As Cézanne said of a different Courbet seascape (the spectacular “Wave,” from 1870, in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin): “You have to step back. The entire room feels the spray.”
‘PAINTING,’ BY PHILIP GUSTON, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Though it’s currently on view in the Modern’s “Abstract Expressionist New York,” this Guston from 1954 could just as easily hang with the Cézannes, Maleviches, Monets and Mondrians up on the fifth floor.
Guston was looking closely at Mondrian’s “plus-minus” paintings — and undoubtedly at Cézanne as well — as he crosshatched his way around the canvas. His welter of marks looks controlled but not schematic. “Abstract Impressionism” it was termed at the time, though the clunkier phrase “Post-Impressionist Neo-Plasticism” is closer to the truth.
“Painting” is also small, by the standards of this show (which runs through April 25). It takes a while to appreciate that Guston, like his Ab-Ex peers, was reorienting the artist-canvas relationship. He did it not with drips or big sweeps of the arm but by working close-up and not stepping back until he was finished.
Color also sets Guston’s painting apart from just about everything else in the Ab-Ex rehang, with the possible exception of de Kooning’s “Woman I.” The diffuse pinkish-orange blob at the center of “Painting,” offset by the faintest touch of green, is icy hot — like frostbitten skin or a cigarette tossed into a snowdrift. I also like to think of this work as a blushing monochrome, a literalization of Guston’s famous credo “painting is ‘impure.’ ”
Long-suppressed figures would re-emerge in Guston’s post-1970 painting, which is probably more important to artists working today. But this midcentury canvas is, for me, one of the best moments in a show that includes whole rooms of Pollocks and Rothkos.
‘STILL LIFE WITH APPLES,’ BY CéZANNE, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART You’ll find this still life from 1895-98 on the Modern’s fifth floor, just to the right of Cézanne’s halting “Bather,” and generally ignored by the crowds moving on to van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” If you’ve seen one Cézanne still life, you’ve seen them all, the thinking goes.
Find a viewing spot in the stream of traffic, though, and you’ll be rewarded with a work of art that has some serious momentum — heading full tilt for Cubism, Matisse and Morandi.
The apples, of all different colors and sizes, seem to be tumbling out of the print on the curtain, scattering across the table like billiards balls. They look more alive than the bather, who seems to be frozen in place. And they’re not just moving, but coming into being: getting progressively rounder, heavier, more applelike, as they approach the right side of the picture.
Like other Cézanne still lifes this one feels experimental. But I also love it for its unscientific quirks (I hesitate to call them flaws): the unfinished upper-left corner, the meringuelike peaks of the white tablecloth, the squashed ellipse of that bowl. Can you really separate volume from perspective? This painting answers that question with a resounding yes.
Overlooked Works That Deserve Another Glance By KAREN ROSENBERG
‘MANUEL OSORIO MANRIQUE DE ZUÑIGA,’ BY GOYA, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART There’s a reason that this painting is one of the first you see when you walk up the Met’s main staircase, pass through the heavy glass doors into European Paintings, and turn right (as museumgoers invariably do). It isn’t just the color — an arresting tomato red against green-gray — or the adorably precocious subject, the third son of the count of Altamira. It’s the unsettling way in which Goya complicates 18th-century ideas about childhood.
The small brown-eyed boy, the caged finches, the magpie on a leash and the predatory cats (who reappear as feral monstrosities in Goya’s “Caprichos”) lend themselves to different, and contradictory, readings. You can look at this painting (possibly from the 1790s) and see a careless kid about to lose a pet, or you can see the light-haloed Manuel as a magical innocent. (More than one art historian has compared him to the Christ child.) Either way, you sense “Goya’s awareness of how contingent life is,” to quote the critic Robert Hughes.
That awareness is certainly heightened by the fact that Manuel never lived to see adulthood (he died in 1792, and it’s thought that the portrait may be a memorial) and by our knowledge of Goya’s own losses. (At least seven of his offspring died in infancy.) Although the dark mood of later Goya is much in evidence here, the painting has talismanic properties, as if the image of Manuel could somehow warn or protect other children.
Goya painted other members of the Altamira family, though not with as much intensity. His portrait of the countess — shown seated and expressionless in a pale pink satin dress, balancing Manuel’s baby sister on her lap — is at the Met too, in the Lehman Wing. And Manuel has a not-too-distant cousin in Manet’s “Boy With a Sword,” also at the museum, another poker-faced youth toting some very adult baggage.
‘ST. FRANCIS IN THE DESERT,’ BY GIOVANNI BELLINI, THE FRICK COLLECTION This transfixing figure in a landscape stands up to a formidable squad of portraits — two Titians, two Holbeins and an El Greco — in the Frick’s Living Hall. The painting’s subject is a matter of some debate, but it is most likely St. Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata on Mount Alverna. (Note the red marks on his hands.) Unquestionably the work, from 1480, links nature and religious ecstasy in ways that would be familiar to 19th- and 20th-century artists like Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Cole and Charles Burchfield.
The saint, emerging from a cavelike shelter into brilliant sunshine, stands on a precipice in the foreground. His torso inclines in a near-perfect echo of the laurel tree at the upper left corner. Behind him a rabbit, a heron, a donkey and a flock of sheep find footholds in the hilly Tuscan landscape, which retains its crystalline level of focus as it zigs and zags into the far distance.
His expression is wonderfully ambiguous. Is he joyous? Wary? Awestruck? Or, as some scholars have suggested, might he be singing hymns?
Those who wish to can spend days parsing the painting’s symbolism: the sandals, the skull, the little spout of water. (Even the rock formations are said to allude to specific elements of Franciscan literature.) But I’d much rather linger over the shimmering blue-gold surfaces and creeping light. Apparently the Frick’s conservators would too; last March and April they removed the Bellini for close study with x-radiographs, microscopes and other instruments. Their findings will be revealed this spring at a “dossier” exhibition in the Oval Room.
In the meantime Bellini’s “St. Francis” is a refuge within the Frick. It absorbs the withering stares of El Greco’s “St. Jerome” and Holbein’s “Sir Thomas More,” across the room, and deflects the seductive vanity and materialism of the Titians on either side. It’s hard to think of another painting that would be up to the task.
‘THE SEA,’ BY COURBET, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART This pint-size painting, from 1873, hangs in a gallery with larger, more important Courbets like the Salon painting “Woman With a Parrot.” It’s one of the many seascapes, or “marines,” he made in the 1860s and ’70s: a body of work many critics have dismissed as representing the more conventional, and marketable, side of this rebellious Realist. But for some reason I can’t get enough of it.
It’s a Janus of a painting, saluting the Romanticism of Turner and Géricault while hailing a nascent Impressionism. Courbet started to make seascapes like this one in the mid-1860s; Monet’s “Impression: Sunrise,” considered the movement’s inaugural work, dates from 1872.
Courbet’s sea, though, is more salt and grit than light and air. He called his seascapes “sea landscapes,” an apt description given the solidity of the water. He made liberal use of the palette knife, not just in the sandy strip of foreground but also along the wave crests. The painting’s insistent materiality incites covetousness, in defiance of its vast and unpossessable subject.
At the same time the sea and the sky seem to belong to two different pictures. Art historians think Courbet might have been looking at photographs of the ocean made by Gustave Le Gray and others that were sometimes printed from two negatives with different exposure times. The painting has a similarly eerie split along the horizon, with its distant but fast-charging clouds that don’t seem — yet — to have teased the waves to significant heights.
In that sky, and along those whitecaps, you can see modernism gathering force: Marsden Hartley, maybe even Rothko and Brice Marden. But a big part of the painting’s appeal is Courbet’s particular brand of nervy Realism. As Cézanne said of a different Courbet seascape (the spectacular “Wave,” from 1870, in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin): “You have to step back. The entire room feels the spray.”
‘PAINTING,’ BY PHILIP GUSTON, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Though it’s currently on view in the Modern’s “Abstract Expressionist New York,” this Guston from 1954 could just as easily hang with the Cézannes, Maleviches, Monets and Mondrians up on the fifth floor.
Guston was looking closely at Mondrian’s “plus-minus” paintings — and undoubtedly at Cézanne as well — as he crosshatched his way around the canvas. His welter of marks looks controlled but not schematic. “Abstract Impressionism” it was termed at the time, though the clunkier phrase “Post-Impressionist Neo-Plasticism” is closer to the truth.
“Painting” is also small, by the standards of this show (which runs through April 25). It takes a while to appreciate that Guston, like his Ab-Ex peers, was reorienting the artist-canvas relationship. He did it not with drips or big sweeps of the arm but by working close-up and not stepping back until he was finished.
Color also sets Guston’s painting apart from just about everything else in the Ab-Ex rehang, with the possible exception of de Kooning’s “Woman I.” The diffuse pinkish-orange blob at the center of “Painting,” offset by the faintest touch of green, is icy hot — like frostbitten skin or a cigarette tossed into a snowdrift. I also like to think of this work as a blushing monochrome, a literalization of Guston’s famous credo “painting is ‘impure.’ ”
Long-suppressed figures would re-emerge in Guston’s post-1970 painting, which is probably more important to artists working today. But this midcentury canvas is, for me, one of the best moments in a show that includes whole rooms of Pollocks and Rothkos.
‘STILL LIFE WITH APPLES,’ BY CéZANNE, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART You’ll find this still life from 1895-98 on the Modern’s fifth floor, just to the right of Cézanne’s halting “Bather,” and generally ignored by the crowds moving on to van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” If you’ve seen one Cézanne still life, you’ve seen them all, the thinking goes.
Find a viewing spot in the stream of traffic, though, and you’ll be rewarded with a work of art that has some serious momentum — heading full tilt for Cubism, Matisse and Morandi.
The apples, of all different colors and sizes, seem to be tumbling out of the print on the curtain, scattering across the table like billiards balls. They look more alive than the bather, who seems to be frozen in place. And they’re not just moving, but coming into being: getting progressively rounder, heavier, more applelike, as they approach the right side of the picture.
Like other Cézanne still lifes this one feels experimental. But I also love it for its unscientific quirks (I hesitate to call them flaws): the unfinished upper-left corner, the meringuelike peaks of the white tablecloth, the squashed ellipse of that bowl. Can you really separate volume from perspective? This painting answers that question with a resounding yes.
Perfect Poise, Pulled From Jaws of Distortion By KEN JOHNSON
December 30, 2010 Perfect Poise, Pulled From Jaws of Distortion By KEN JOHNSON
‘COMTESSE D’HAUSSONVILLE,’ BY INGRES, THE FRICK COLLECTION If not always for the same reasons, people of both genders love to feast their eyes on beautiful women. So it is no coincidence that some of the world’s most compelling works of art are weddings of female and painterly beauty. One is at the Frick Collection: “Comtesse d’Haussonville” (1845), a near life-size portrait of a lovely young woman standing before a mirror in a blue satin dress. Rendered by Ingres in a cool, neo-Classical style, she tilts her head, holds an index finger to her chin and gazes back with lowered eyelids and a quizzical, enigmatic expression.
The blue dress is a tour de force of realistic depiction, its every fold and wrinkle attended to with as much care as the marmoreal surfaces of the comtesse’s flawless skin. (Ingres drew about 60 studies for the dress alone during the three years he worked on the portrait.) And yet, as art historians never tire of pointing out to novice viewers, her body is oddly misshapen. Her pudgy right arm seems to have grown out of her stomach, her upper back looks painfully hunched, and her egg-shaped head appears about to roll off her elongated neck as if in a Monty Python cartoon.
You don’t notice the distortions at first because of how subtly Ingres folded her parts into a configuration of interlocking ovals, giving the impression of perfect poise. The painting may be a triumph of form over anatomy — Picasso certainly took notice — but the comtesse still casts a spell.
Intellectually ambitious as well as beautiful, the comtesse, a k a Louise d’Haussonville, went on to write memoirs, romantic novels, historical studies and biographies, including two volumes on Lord Byron. She was 27 when Ingres finished her portrait; he was 65. A friend told her, “M. Ingres must be in love with you to have painted you this way.” Indeed.
‘THE MOUNTAIN,’ BY BALTHUS, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART The hikers in Balthus’s “Mountain” (1936-37) could be a group of patients on an alpine excursion from Carl Jung’s psychiatric clinic just outside Zurich. It is not like a French Impressionist holiday scene. These mountaineers have a sculptural solidity about them; they seem magically frozen into living statues. Each has a curiously distracted expression. The sky is blue, but not in an airy way; it seems heavy and dark, enhancing the ominous atmosphere of the picture.
At more than 8 feet tall and 12 feet wide “The Mountain” is the biggest painting Balthus made, and it is markedly different from the works for which he is best known. Updating neo-Classical style and narrative, he made interior scenes in which young girls are viewed with an erotic interest that many critics have found unseemly.
Though comparatively chaste, “The Mountain” is not without a certain dreamy, sexual tension. The girl who stretches like a cat in the light of the sun is a typical Balthusian object of desire, and so is the girl reclining at her feet in sleep.
What this gathering means is hard to say, but each figure seems emblematic in some way. The man gripping a pipe in his teeth and kneeling in the foreground has his face pinched into a mask of saturnine tension. He is earthy and rocklike. The sun-struck, stretching girl is day; the sleeping one night. The androgynous figure in a red, short-sleeve jacket looking on from the middle distance with enigmatic intent seems elfin and mischievous, perhaps an agent of transformation.
Another strange thing is how the landscape echoes the figures. The highest peak seems to heave up in response to the stretching girl. A vaguely humanoid projection mimics the swayed posture of the elfin androgyne. The man and woman at the edge of the illuminated abyss point excitedly at a mass of rock that resembles a Cubist sculpture of a couple kissing.
Somehow the picture would not be complete without the tiny, lone figure in the distance on a rising field of grass: a romantic wanderer traveling far away from human society and ever closer to the divine.
‘EARLY SUNDAY MORNING,’ BY EDWARD HOPPER, THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART Many of Hopper’s most beloved paintings offer nocturnal views from the outside into electrically lighted interiors: a diner in which night owls sit at the counter or an apartment in which a single woman ponders her life. It’s as if we were seeing through the eyes of a lonely insomniac pining for human contact.
In “Early Sunday Morning” (1930) we look out rather than in, but the piercing loneliness is just as palpable. The raking sun is hard and cold. The windows of the buildings are implacably dark. Painted with a dry, slightly brushy touch, it is a scene of aching solitude, although relieved by the transcendental light.
The subject is a stretch of buildings on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, but it could just as well be the main street of a factory town upstate or somewhere in New England. A red, white and blue barber pole and a squat fireplug stand in for absent pedestrians. The bright barber pole looks oddly incongruous, even surrealistically so, on this dingy street. A totemlike symbol of patriotic, small-town American values, it is another sign of human community that Hopper, always the outsider, considers with mordant curiosity.
American Scene painting by artists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood was popular at the time; maybe Hopper’s painting was a wry nod to that chauvinistic trend.
And yet there is also a feeling of wonder. People will be out and about in a while, but for now they are sleeping in, nestled in apartments above the street-level shops, wrapped up in their dreams. The early-rising viewer has the world all to himself.
Though tinged by melancholy — the Great Depression had hit the nation like a hurricane — there a sense of possibility in the air and light. This moment might have come at the end of an all-night bender, but there it is, the promise of a brand new day.
‘A STORM IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, MT. ROSALIE,’ BY ALBERT BIERSTADT, THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM If Albert Bierstadt were reincarnated as a Hollywood movie director, he would surely give James Cameron a run for his money. In the mid-19th century Bierstadt advanced the art of spectacular illusion making to great popular acclaim, as viewers by the thousands lined up and paid money to see his enormous Western landscapes, meticulously rendered with nearly photographic verisimilitude, presented in gaslighted, theatrical installations. Also like Mr. Cameron, Bierstadt projected visions of transcendentalist pantheism in which American Indians and deer lived, like the Na’vi in “Avatar,” in conditions of Edenic bliss.
In the 12-foot-wide “Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie” (1866) sunlight breaking through angry, dark clouds shines on a peaceful lake like a promise from God. This was the age of Emerson and Thoreau, who found in every part of nature, from leaves of grass to towering mountains, metaphors of divine beneficence. Bierstadt was as attentive to the microscopic as he was to the macro, and this makes for an enthralling visual and poetic experience.
Bierstadt named Mount Rosalie, now called Mount Evans, after Rosalie Osborne Ludlow, who married him in 1866 after she divorced his traveling companion Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Fitz Hugh Ludlow is remembered today for his best-selling autobiographical book “The Hasheesh Eater” (1857), in which he explored the wonders of subjective experience under the influence of cannabis.
As it turned out, Bierstadt’s paintings of the Wild West did more to attract than to discourage invasion by forces of industrial progress. For most of the 20th century his paintings were relegated to the dustbin of art history along with similarly operatic landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church.
Many scholars still view them as unworthy confections of overwrought kitsch. I find myself helplessly thrilled by these artists’ proto-cinematic extravaganzas and, at the same time, saddened to think of the lost paradises they memorialize. For better or worse “A Storm in the Rocky Mountains” tells a story about America that should never be forgotten.
‘YOUNG WOMAN WITH A WATER PITCHER,’ BY VERMEER, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART Vermeer’s “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher” (around 1662) might be my No. 1 desert island pick. Partly it would be for sensory and formal reasons: the silky application of paint, the finely tuned orchestration of velvety blues and coolly luminous near-whites and the structure of nested rectangles. But it is the way that material dimension embodies the image of the girl at the window — caught in the act of turning her head as if to listen for something she thought she heard outdoors — that cinches the deal.
I think of the painting as a kind of Annunciation, making contemporary the moment Mary learns she will conceive and bear a divine child. With her head enveloped by a starchy, crisply creased cowl of virginal whiteness, Vermeer’s young woman is bathed in the light of the Holy Spirit. She holds the handle of a silver pitcher filled with water, the stuff of life, which stands on a silver platter on a tapestry-covered, domestic altar. Pearls and a ribbon spill from a reliquarylike jewel box. All is painted with excruciating, reverential tenderness.
To be sure, everything going on in the picture can be explained without invoking supernatural agency. In its slightly blurry, photographic realism, the painting presents an implacably empirical view of the world. The image looks almost as if it had been photo-chemically imprinted on the canvas without manual intervention, and the picture in turn stamps itself on our retinas. Optical nerves fire, neurotransmitters swarm and the image somehow appears in our minds. Whether you believe in intelligent design or Darwinian happenstance, it is pretty miraculous.
The image in our mind’s eye pictures a painting that pictures a moment in historical time — note the map of Europe on the wall — that may or may not have actually happened but that in any case appears at once immediately real and distantly fictive. All of this incites a hyper-alertness about seeing and a heightened consciousness of consciousness itself and its construction of the real. “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher” announces the birth of the modern, self-reflexive mind.
‘COMTESSE D’HAUSSONVILLE,’ BY INGRES, THE FRICK COLLECTION If not always for the same reasons, people of both genders love to feast their eyes on beautiful women. So it is no coincidence that some of the world’s most compelling works of art are weddings of female and painterly beauty. One is at the Frick Collection: “Comtesse d’Haussonville” (1845), a near life-size portrait of a lovely young woman standing before a mirror in a blue satin dress. Rendered by Ingres in a cool, neo-Classical style, she tilts her head, holds an index finger to her chin and gazes back with lowered eyelids and a quizzical, enigmatic expression.
The blue dress is a tour de force of realistic depiction, its every fold and wrinkle attended to with as much care as the marmoreal surfaces of the comtesse’s flawless skin. (Ingres drew about 60 studies for the dress alone during the three years he worked on the portrait.) And yet, as art historians never tire of pointing out to novice viewers, her body is oddly misshapen. Her pudgy right arm seems to have grown out of her stomach, her upper back looks painfully hunched, and her egg-shaped head appears about to roll off her elongated neck as if in a Monty Python cartoon.
You don’t notice the distortions at first because of how subtly Ingres folded her parts into a configuration of interlocking ovals, giving the impression of perfect poise. The painting may be a triumph of form over anatomy — Picasso certainly took notice — but the comtesse still casts a spell.
Intellectually ambitious as well as beautiful, the comtesse, a k a Louise d’Haussonville, went on to write memoirs, romantic novels, historical studies and biographies, including two volumes on Lord Byron. She was 27 when Ingres finished her portrait; he was 65. A friend told her, “M. Ingres must be in love with you to have painted you this way.” Indeed.
‘THE MOUNTAIN,’ BY BALTHUS, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART The hikers in Balthus’s “Mountain” (1936-37) could be a group of patients on an alpine excursion from Carl Jung’s psychiatric clinic just outside Zurich. It is not like a French Impressionist holiday scene. These mountaineers have a sculptural solidity about them; they seem magically frozen into living statues. Each has a curiously distracted expression. The sky is blue, but not in an airy way; it seems heavy and dark, enhancing the ominous atmosphere of the picture.
At more than 8 feet tall and 12 feet wide “The Mountain” is the biggest painting Balthus made, and it is markedly different from the works for which he is best known. Updating neo-Classical style and narrative, he made interior scenes in which young girls are viewed with an erotic interest that many critics have found unseemly.
Though comparatively chaste, “The Mountain” is not without a certain dreamy, sexual tension. The girl who stretches like a cat in the light of the sun is a typical Balthusian object of desire, and so is the girl reclining at her feet in sleep.
What this gathering means is hard to say, but each figure seems emblematic in some way. The man gripping a pipe in his teeth and kneeling in the foreground has his face pinched into a mask of saturnine tension. He is earthy and rocklike. The sun-struck, stretching girl is day; the sleeping one night. The androgynous figure in a red, short-sleeve jacket looking on from the middle distance with enigmatic intent seems elfin and mischievous, perhaps an agent of transformation.
Another strange thing is how the landscape echoes the figures. The highest peak seems to heave up in response to the stretching girl. A vaguely humanoid projection mimics the swayed posture of the elfin androgyne. The man and woman at the edge of the illuminated abyss point excitedly at a mass of rock that resembles a Cubist sculpture of a couple kissing.
Somehow the picture would not be complete without the tiny, lone figure in the distance on a rising field of grass: a romantic wanderer traveling far away from human society and ever closer to the divine.
‘EARLY SUNDAY MORNING,’ BY EDWARD HOPPER, THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART Many of Hopper’s most beloved paintings offer nocturnal views from the outside into electrically lighted interiors: a diner in which night owls sit at the counter or an apartment in which a single woman ponders her life. It’s as if we were seeing through the eyes of a lonely insomniac pining for human contact.
In “Early Sunday Morning” (1930) we look out rather than in, but the piercing loneliness is just as palpable. The raking sun is hard and cold. The windows of the buildings are implacably dark. Painted with a dry, slightly brushy touch, it is a scene of aching solitude, although relieved by the transcendental light.
The subject is a stretch of buildings on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, but it could just as well be the main street of a factory town upstate or somewhere in New England. A red, white and blue barber pole and a squat fireplug stand in for absent pedestrians. The bright barber pole looks oddly incongruous, even surrealistically so, on this dingy street. A totemlike symbol of patriotic, small-town American values, it is another sign of human community that Hopper, always the outsider, considers with mordant curiosity.
American Scene painting by artists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood was popular at the time; maybe Hopper’s painting was a wry nod to that chauvinistic trend.
And yet there is also a feeling of wonder. People will be out and about in a while, but for now they are sleeping in, nestled in apartments above the street-level shops, wrapped up in their dreams. The early-rising viewer has the world all to himself.
Though tinged by melancholy — the Great Depression had hit the nation like a hurricane — there a sense of possibility in the air and light. This moment might have come at the end of an all-night bender, but there it is, the promise of a brand new day.
‘A STORM IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, MT. ROSALIE,’ BY ALBERT BIERSTADT, THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM If Albert Bierstadt were reincarnated as a Hollywood movie director, he would surely give James Cameron a run for his money. In the mid-19th century Bierstadt advanced the art of spectacular illusion making to great popular acclaim, as viewers by the thousands lined up and paid money to see his enormous Western landscapes, meticulously rendered with nearly photographic verisimilitude, presented in gaslighted, theatrical installations. Also like Mr. Cameron, Bierstadt projected visions of transcendentalist pantheism in which American Indians and deer lived, like the Na’vi in “Avatar,” in conditions of Edenic bliss.
In the 12-foot-wide “Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie” (1866) sunlight breaking through angry, dark clouds shines on a peaceful lake like a promise from God. This was the age of Emerson and Thoreau, who found in every part of nature, from leaves of grass to towering mountains, metaphors of divine beneficence. Bierstadt was as attentive to the microscopic as he was to the macro, and this makes for an enthralling visual and poetic experience.
Bierstadt named Mount Rosalie, now called Mount Evans, after Rosalie Osborne Ludlow, who married him in 1866 after she divorced his traveling companion Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Fitz Hugh Ludlow is remembered today for his best-selling autobiographical book “The Hasheesh Eater” (1857), in which he explored the wonders of subjective experience under the influence of cannabis.
As it turned out, Bierstadt’s paintings of the Wild West did more to attract than to discourage invasion by forces of industrial progress. For most of the 20th century his paintings were relegated to the dustbin of art history along with similarly operatic landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church.
Many scholars still view them as unworthy confections of overwrought kitsch. I find myself helplessly thrilled by these artists’ proto-cinematic extravaganzas and, at the same time, saddened to think of the lost paradises they memorialize. For better or worse “A Storm in the Rocky Mountains” tells a story about America that should never be forgotten.
‘YOUNG WOMAN WITH A WATER PITCHER,’ BY VERMEER, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART Vermeer’s “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher” (around 1662) might be my No. 1 desert island pick. Partly it would be for sensory and formal reasons: the silky application of paint, the finely tuned orchestration of velvety blues and coolly luminous near-whites and the structure of nested rectangles. But it is the way that material dimension embodies the image of the girl at the window — caught in the act of turning her head as if to listen for something she thought she heard outdoors — that cinches the deal.
I think of the painting as a kind of Annunciation, making contemporary the moment Mary learns she will conceive and bear a divine child. With her head enveloped by a starchy, crisply creased cowl of virginal whiteness, Vermeer’s young woman is bathed in the light of the Holy Spirit. She holds the handle of a silver pitcher filled with water, the stuff of life, which stands on a silver platter on a tapestry-covered, domestic altar. Pearls and a ribbon spill from a reliquarylike jewel box. All is painted with excruciating, reverential tenderness.
To be sure, everything going on in the picture can be explained without invoking supernatural agency. In its slightly blurry, photographic realism, the painting presents an implacably empirical view of the world. The image looks almost as if it had been photo-chemically imprinted on the canvas without manual intervention, and the picture in turn stamps itself on our retinas. Optical nerves fire, neurotransmitters swarm and the image somehow appears in our minds. Whether you believe in intelligent design or Darwinian happenstance, it is pretty miraculous.
The image in our mind’s eye pictures a painting that pictures a moment in historical time — note the map of Europe on the wall — that may or may not have actually happened but that in any case appears at once immediately real and distantly fictive. All of this incites a hyper-alertness about seeing and a heightened consciousness of consciousness itself and its construction of the real. “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher” announces the birth of the modern, self-reflexive mind.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
In the Rearview, a Year That Fizzled By DAVID LEONHARDT
December 28, 2010
In the Rearview, a Year That Fizzled By DAVID LEONHARDT
Washington
It was the year that the economy started to recover and then slid back into a slump — only to offer reason for renewed hope in the final weeks.
When 2010 began, hiring and consumer spending were finally picking up. But then something changed in the spring — a combination of the debt troubles in Europe, the fading of stimulus spending and the usual caution by businesses and consumers after a financial crisis. By the summer, the unemployment rate was rising again, and Americans’ attitudes about the future were again souring.
Making matters worse, many of the economy’s long-term problems also became more severe this year. Health care costs continued to rise faster than inflation, and the number of uninsured continued to grow. The most recent climate data suggested 2010 would be the hottest or second-hottest year ever recorded; the 10 hottest have all occurred in the last 13 years, creating serious risks for the planet and its economy. The federal budget deficit ballooned further (though it should grow during an economic slump).
The reasons for optimism about 2011 come from both Washington and the private sector. The Federal Reserve and Congress have finally taken more action to lift economic growth, and the latest data — on consumer spending and jobless claims, among other things — has been good. The housing market remains weak, but sales and prices are no longer plunging.
On the longer-term issues, the recent work by President Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission suggested that Democrats and Republicans might eventually find some common ground on the issue. And the health care overhaul passed in March — assuming it survives legal challenges — is likely to cut the number of uninsured sharply and to reduce cost growth modestly. The one issue that offers little reason for optimism is climate change.
Among the big questions for 2011 are: How severe will state and local budget crises turn out to be? Will Europe’s debt troubles spread to Spain, Portugal or elsewhere? Will Congress and the White House manage to focus on the long-run causes of the deficit — or instead cut federal spending immediately and jeopardize the recovery? Will consumers continue to increase their spending and give businesses the confidence to hire?
To look back at 2010 and to look ahead, we have put together a series of charts. If there is an overall message, it’s that the economy still needs a whole lot of work.
Dishes That Earned Their Stars By SAM SIFTON and Recipe: Guacamole Roasted Grapefruite
December 28, 2010
Dishes That Earned Their Stars By SAM SIFTON
I MADE a list of the 15 best things I ate in New York City in the past year of reviewing restaurants for The New York Times. It is an accounting that comprises restaurant dishes of uncommon excellence and flavor. Together they underscore New York’s place as one of the planet’s best cities in which to dine out.
And we’ll get to them soon enough.
But these dishes make up just one part of a year’s meals taken at the professional table, one sleeve in the accordion folder marked “2010 Delicious.” Add meals I ate out of town on assignment or off the clock or on the way to the clock, and the catalog swells. There is, for example, the sandwich of deep-fried oysters and house-made bacon I had this year at Cochon in New Orleans, served on white Pullman bread with a chili-spiked mayonnaise. And the black vinegar spare ribs with pine nuts served at Shanghai River in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Hoarsely I sing to the poached egg, potato mousseline and chorizo crumble I inhaled at LudoBites 5.0, in downtown Los Angeles. Also to the rabbit parfait with rabbit rillettes and a cinnamon-scented rabbit consommé at Alinea in Chicago (whoa, now!).
Closer to home, there were the Shanghai-style dumplings from Chui Hong Yuan in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, and lunchtime salads from Yemen Café near Brooklyn Heights, and midafternoon pickled veal tongue at M. Wells in Long Island City, Queens, and, always, plates of oxtail gravy over rice and peas from the Golden Krust on Eighth Avenue in Midtown.
For breakfast, there was the grapefruit at Pulino’s in SoHo, not really a dish so much as a magic trick, the fruit covered with muscovado sugar and mint, then cooked into caramel. (A recipe for it and a few other dishes appear here.)
There is the fist of bluefin I got this summer from the fishing guide Brendan McCarthy, who killed a tuna off Cape Cod after a long slog east from Montauk in the wind. I ate part of it raw, with soy sauce, and cooked the rest for the children, who ate it as if it were cake.
And I want to remember forever the martini I drank at the Carlyle before hearing John Pizzarelli and his wife, Jessica Molaskey, sing, with Mr. Pizzarelli’s father, Bucky, in the audience. (I waved to him before the show. “Who’s playing tonight?” he asked, and laughed.)
Also: the barbecue chicken I got from a guy cooking out of a trailer in the parking lot of a Tractor Supply Company in rural Delaware. And a plate of topneck clams from Randazzo’s in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. And the fish tacos I crushed on the sidewalk in front of Juanita’s Taco Shop in Encinitas, Calif. Them, too.
But the following list, which is presented in no particular order, reflects my professional experience over the course of 12 months dining out specifically in New York City restaurants, hoping each night to be surprised, yearning to be delighted, always hungry for the next great bite.
CODFISH FRITTERS WITH LAMB-SAUSAGE RAGÙ AT RECETTE Jesse Schenker, the extravagantly tattooed chef and owner of this estimable West Village restaurant, makes a classic salt-cod bacalao, then deep-fries small balls of it. Paired with a fiery little lamb Bolognese with hints of smoked paprika and vinegar, and served beneath a drizzle of curried mayonnaise, it is an immensely flavorful introduction to his studied, intricate and soulful cooking. 328 West 12th Street (Greenwich Street), Greenwich Village; , recettenyc.com.
‘SIMPLY COOKED’ SCALLOPS AT THE MARK RESTAURANT BY JEAN-GEORGES Four scallops the color of gold, adorned only with salt and pepper, sitting on a white plate in the manner of a gift. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who opened this restaurant in the Mark Hotel this year with Pierre Schutz in the kitchen, pairs the shellfish with a small bowl of sauce: a pink-hued, sriracha-enhanced mixture of egg yolks, grapeseed oil, kombu seaweed water and orange and lime juice. Mayonnaise for the celestial set. 25 East 77th Street, Upper East Side; (212) 606-3030, themarkrestaurantnyc.com.
BURGUNDY SNAILS AT MÁ PÊCHE These tender little nuggets, garlicky and sweet, are as pure an example of old-school French cooking as you’re ever likely to find at a David Chang restaurant, outside of the way the cooks bathe fish in hot butter at Momofuku Ko. Tien Ho, Má Pêche’s chef, combines the snails with a fat pork sausage in a sticky, almost unctuous sauce, suitable for mopping and mopping and mopping up with a crisp piece of baguette. 15 West 56th Street, Midtown; (212) 757-5878, momofuku.com/ma-peche/.
WHOLE WHEAT TONARELLI WITH SPICY CICERCHIE, ROSEMARY AND SHAVED BONITO AT DEL POSTO It sounds like hippie spaghetti with chickpeas, I know. But Mark Ladner, whose brilliance in the kitchen helped elevate Del Posto into the thin air of four-star restaurants this year, takes a rich, toothsome pasta and combines it with the earthy flavor of chickpeas and the piney scent of rosemary to create something that evokes nothing so much as a coastal forest. As the bonito flakes wilt and shrivel in the heat of the finished dish, they release a briny pungency into the air, completing the mental image. It’s crazy: this was just supposed to be dinner. 85 10th Avenue (16th Street); (212) 497-8090, delposto.com.
SMOKED CRAB LAKSA AT FATTY ’CUE A funky smokiness runs along like a bass line in this luscious bowl of soft, thick lai fun noodles, with a melody made up of cold-smoked lump crab meat, tiny anchovies, maitake and shiitake mushrooms, grated daikon, brown-rice vinegar, unrefined palm syrup and fiery chili heat, addictive as Marlboros. 91 South Sixth Street (Bedford Avenue), Williamsburg, Brooklyn; (718) 599-3090, fattycue.com.
BLACK SEA BASS WITH CHILIES, HERBS, RED BLISS POTATOES AND SPINACH AT ABC KITCHEN Spa food doesn’t come much better than this herb- and jalapeño-scented roast fish served at the second restaurant Mr. Vongerichten opened in Manhattan this year, with Dan Kluger in the kitchen. Soft potatoes accompany the plate, with wilted spinach hit up with sweet lemon confit. Oh, man. 35 East 18th Street, ground floor of ABC Carpet & Home; (212) 475-5829, abckitchennyc.com.
GARGANELLI WITH CREAM, TRUFFLE BUTTER AND PROSCIUTTO AT OSTERIA MORINI These beautifully shaped and cooked quills of pasta swim in heavy cream and truffle-scented butter, alongside wisps of smooth, salty prosciutto. The food of Emilia-Romagna is the point of this pretty new restaurant from Michael White, and if it’s richer and silkier than the genuine article, that is all to the good: Intensity is at the center of his Italian love affair. 218 Lafayette Street (Spring Street), SoHo; (212) 965-8777, osteriamorini.com.
GUACAMOLE FRUTAS AT TOLOACHE It is one of the great treats of the theater district, up there with bumping into Laura Benanti in front of Joe Allen: the chunky guacamole with apple, pear and jalapeño that the chef Julian Medina serves at his marvelous little Mexican joint on 50th Street. Just add margaritas. 251 West 50th Street, Clinton; (212) 581-1818, toloachenyc.com.
CHILI LOBSTER AT MARC FORGIONE An upscale take on the classic Singaporean dish of chili crab, Marc Forgione’s appetizer (at his rustic and comfortable TriBeCa restaurant) offers cull lobster in a fiery sea of butter and sriracha, ginger, soy and lobster stock, with a faint note of lime acidity on top. Big hunks of Texas toast come along with, in place of steamed buns. 134 Reade Street (Hudson Street), TriBeCa; (212) 941-9401, marcforgione.com.
DEVIL’S CHICKEN AT TORRISI ITALIAN SPECIALTIES There is a new menu virtually every night at the tiny restaurant that Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone run out of their Little Italy storefront (at which, at lunchtime, you can reliably find the city’s best turkey sandwich). Dozens of dishes have graced them. But the devil’s chicken, a smoky-hot version of the classic pollo alla diavola, with crackling skin and a swab of tangy local yogurt, remains a highlight. 250 Mulberry Street (Prince Street), Little Italy; (212) 965-0955, piginahat.com.
BUTTER-POACHED OYSTERS WITH CELERY ROOT AT COLICCHIO & SONS In a restaurant that offers both the casual ease of its tap room and the more formalized experience of a tasting menu in its main dining room, these sweet little fatties from the à la carte menu were a brilliant demilitarized zone, with celery root that had been cooked and cut into a vegetable rendition of tagliatelle pasta, and a large smack of American caviar on top for seasoning and texture. 85 10th Avenue (15th Street), Chelsea; (212) 400-6699, colicchioandsons.com.
ARROZ CON PATO AT NUELA Giant, shareable dishes are the chef Adam Schop’s great strength at this nightclubby Latinate restaurant. And nowhere is his skill more apparent than with this big duck paella, served with foie gras, duck confit, seared breast, a pile of gizzards and a massive fried duck egg on a plate the size of a manhole cover: grandiose peasant food in a nightclub restaurant in the greatest city on earth. 43 West 24th Street, Flatiron district; (212) 929-1200, nuelany.com.
HETE BLIKSEM AT VANDAAG Phillip Kirschen-Clark, the chef at this spare and elegant Netherlandish restaurant, brings a firm understanding of the intersection between sweet and savory to this side dish to lunchtime sandwiches and evening hen. “Hot lightning” is how the words translate from the Dutch: little fried fingerling potatoes combined with smoked bacon and a tiny dice of tart apples, all of it glossed in stroop, a velvety syrup made of sugar, butter, cream and molasses, then flavored with juniper, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon. 103 Second Avenue (Sixth Street), East Village; (212) 253-0470, vandaagnyc.com.
CAVATELLI CON VONGOLE AT LINCOLN Opinions abound about whether there should be a $20 million new restaurant on the Lincoln Center campus and, if so, what it should be like and whom it should serve and what they should pay. While you’re discussing that, eat the chef Jonathan Benno’s cavatelli with razor clams, a warm bowl of beautifully prepared pasta the same size as the perfectly cooked clams, with sweet peppers to match and lemon thyme and butter for flavor. The dish leaves people moving their arms as if they were Alan Gilbert at the Philharmonic, calling in the bassoons. Lincoln Center, 142 West 65th Street, Upper West Side; (212) 359-6500, lincolnristorante.com.
SFERA DI CAPRINO, CELERY AND FIG AGRODOLCE AND CELERY SORBET AT DEL POSTO Brooks Headley, the pastry chef at Del Posto, has the appearance of a rock drummer who just fell off the couch. (Until he started cooking, in fact, that was his job.) But he makes dessert like a beautiful demon, and his little goat-cheesecake spheres, rolled in salted bread crumbs made slick with olive oil, with a sweet-and-sour mixture of celery and figs, and a football of celery sorbet, were hands-down the best dessert I ate this year. Check, please! 85 10th Avenue (16th Street); (212) 497-8090; delposto.com.
December 28, 2010
Guacamole de Frutas
Adapted from Julian Medina, Toloache, Manhattan
Time: 10 minutes
1 tablespoon finely diced sweet onion, like Vidalia
1 teaspoon finely diced seeded jalapeño pepper
1 teaspoon lime juice
Kosher salt
2 tablespoons finely diced peeled Granny Smith apple
2 tablespoons finely diced peeled Asian pear
2 tablespoons dried cranberries
1 teaspoon thinly sliced basil, preferably Thai
2 ripe Haas avocados
1 tablespoon fresh pomegranate seeds.
1. In a nonreactive mixing bowl, combine onion, jalapeño, lime juice and a pinch salt. Mix well, and add the apple, pear, cranberries and basil. Mix again.
2. Cut the avocados in half, scoop out the pulp and mash it with the ingredients in the bowl. Adjust salt to taste. Transfer to a serving bowl and top with pomegranate seeds. If desired, serve with warm corn tortillas or chips.
Yield: About 1 1/2 cups (4 servings).
Roasted Grapefruit
Adapted from Nate Appleman, Pulino’s Bar & Pizzeria, Manhattan
Time: 15 minutes
1 grapefruit
1/3 cup muscovado sugar
2 teaspoons finely chopped mint.
1. Cut the grapefruit in half and thoroughly loosen all sections with a knife. Dry the cut surface with a paper towel.
2. Put the sugar in a 10-inch heavy skillet and place over medium-high heat. Stir until the sugar melts and darkens slightly, about 2 minutes; do not let it burn. Spread it across the pan (it will not coat evenly) and immediately add the grapefruit halves, cut sides down.
3. Move the grapefruit in the pan to coat the surface. Using tongs or two spoons, transfer to serving dishes, cut sides up. Sprinkle with mint and serve immediately.
Yield: 2 servings.
Dishes That Earned Their Stars By SAM SIFTON
I MADE a list of the 15 best things I ate in New York City in the past year of reviewing restaurants for The New York Times. It is an accounting that comprises restaurant dishes of uncommon excellence and flavor. Together they underscore New York’s place as one of the planet’s best cities in which to dine out.
And we’ll get to them soon enough.
But these dishes make up just one part of a year’s meals taken at the professional table, one sleeve in the accordion folder marked “2010 Delicious.” Add meals I ate out of town on assignment or off the clock or on the way to the clock, and the catalog swells. There is, for example, the sandwich of deep-fried oysters and house-made bacon I had this year at Cochon in New Orleans, served on white Pullman bread with a chili-spiked mayonnaise. And the black vinegar spare ribs with pine nuts served at Shanghai River in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Hoarsely I sing to the poached egg, potato mousseline and chorizo crumble I inhaled at LudoBites 5.0, in downtown Los Angeles. Also to the rabbit parfait with rabbit rillettes and a cinnamon-scented rabbit consommé at Alinea in Chicago (whoa, now!).
Closer to home, there were the Shanghai-style dumplings from Chui Hong Yuan in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, and lunchtime salads from Yemen Café near Brooklyn Heights, and midafternoon pickled veal tongue at M. Wells in Long Island City, Queens, and, always, plates of oxtail gravy over rice and peas from the Golden Krust on Eighth Avenue in Midtown.
For breakfast, there was the grapefruit at Pulino’s in SoHo, not really a dish so much as a magic trick, the fruit covered with muscovado sugar and mint, then cooked into caramel. (A recipe for it and a few other dishes appear here.)
There is the fist of bluefin I got this summer from the fishing guide Brendan McCarthy, who killed a tuna off Cape Cod after a long slog east from Montauk in the wind. I ate part of it raw, with soy sauce, and cooked the rest for the children, who ate it as if it were cake.
And I want to remember forever the martini I drank at the Carlyle before hearing John Pizzarelli and his wife, Jessica Molaskey, sing, with Mr. Pizzarelli’s father, Bucky, in the audience. (I waved to him before the show. “Who’s playing tonight?” he asked, and laughed.)
Also: the barbecue chicken I got from a guy cooking out of a trailer in the parking lot of a Tractor Supply Company in rural Delaware. And a plate of topneck clams from Randazzo’s in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. And the fish tacos I crushed on the sidewalk in front of Juanita’s Taco Shop in Encinitas, Calif. Them, too.
But the following list, which is presented in no particular order, reflects my professional experience over the course of 12 months dining out specifically in New York City restaurants, hoping each night to be surprised, yearning to be delighted, always hungry for the next great bite.
CODFISH FRITTERS WITH LAMB-SAUSAGE RAGÙ AT RECETTE Jesse Schenker, the extravagantly tattooed chef and owner of this estimable West Village restaurant, makes a classic salt-cod bacalao, then deep-fries small balls of it. Paired with a fiery little lamb Bolognese with hints of smoked paprika and vinegar, and served beneath a drizzle of curried mayonnaise, it is an immensely flavorful introduction to his studied, intricate and soulful cooking. 328 West 12th Street (Greenwich Street), Greenwich Village; , recettenyc.com.
‘SIMPLY COOKED’ SCALLOPS AT THE MARK RESTAURANT BY JEAN-GEORGES Four scallops the color of gold, adorned only with salt and pepper, sitting on a white plate in the manner of a gift. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who opened this restaurant in the Mark Hotel this year with Pierre Schutz in the kitchen, pairs the shellfish with a small bowl of sauce: a pink-hued, sriracha-enhanced mixture of egg yolks, grapeseed oil, kombu seaweed water and orange and lime juice. Mayonnaise for the celestial set. 25 East 77th Street, Upper East Side; (212) 606-3030, themarkrestaurantnyc.com.
BURGUNDY SNAILS AT MÁ PÊCHE These tender little nuggets, garlicky and sweet, are as pure an example of old-school French cooking as you’re ever likely to find at a David Chang restaurant, outside of the way the cooks bathe fish in hot butter at Momofuku Ko. Tien Ho, Má Pêche’s chef, combines the snails with a fat pork sausage in a sticky, almost unctuous sauce, suitable for mopping and mopping and mopping up with a crisp piece of baguette. 15 West 56th Street, Midtown; (212) 757-5878, momofuku.com/ma-peche/.
WHOLE WHEAT TONARELLI WITH SPICY CICERCHIE, ROSEMARY AND SHAVED BONITO AT DEL POSTO It sounds like hippie spaghetti with chickpeas, I know. But Mark Ladner, whose brilliance in the kitchen helped elevate Del Posto into the thin air of four-star restaurants this year, takes a rich, toothsome pasta and combines it with the earthy flavor of chickpeas and the piney scent of rosemary to create something that evokes nothing so much as a coastal forest. As the bonito flakes wilt and shrivel in the heat of the finished dish, they release a briny pungency into the air, completing the mental image. It’s crazy: this was just supposed to be dinner. 85 10th Avenue (16th Street); (212) 497-8090, delposto.com.
SMOKED CRAB LAKSA AT FATTY ’CUE A funky smokiness runs along like a bass line in this luscious bowl of soft, thick lai fun noodles, with a melody made up of cold-smoked lump crab meat, tiny anchovies, maitake and shiitake mushrooms, grated daikon, brown-rice vinegar, unrefined palm syrup and fiery chili heat, addictive as Marlboros. 91 South Sixth Street (Bedford Avenue), Williamsburg, Brooklyn; (718) 599-3090, fattycue.com.
BLACK SEA BASS WITH CHILIES, HERBS, RED BLISS POTATOES AND SPINACH AT ABC KITCHEN Spa food doesn’t come much better than this herb- and jalapeño-scented roast fish served at the second restaurant Mr. Vongerichten opened in Manhattan this year, with Dan Kluger in the kitchen. Soft potatoes accompany the plate, with wilted spinach hit up with sweet lemon confit. Oh, man. 35 East 18th Street, ground floor of ABC Carpet & Home; (212) 475-5829, abckitchennyc.com.
GARGANELLI WITH CREAM, TRUFFLE BUTTER AND PROSCIUTTO AT OSTERIA MORINI These beautifully shaped and cooked quills of pasta swim in heavy cream and truffle-scented butter, alongside wisps of smooth, salty prosciutto. The food of Emilia-Romagna is the point of this pretty new restaurant from Michael White, and if it’s richer and silkier than the genuine article, that is all to the good: Intensity is at the center of his Italian love affair. 218 Lafayette Street (Spring Street), SoHo; (212) 965-8777, osteriamorini.com.
GUACAMOLE FRUTAS AT TOLOACHE It is one of the great treats of the theater district, up there with bumping into Laura Benanti in front of Joe Allen: the chunky guacamole with apple, pear and jalapeño that the chef Julian Medina serves at his marvelous little Mexican joint on 50th Street. Just add margaritas. 251 West 50th Street, Clinton; (212) 581-1818, toloachenyc.com.
CHILI LOBSTER AT MARC FORGIONE An upscale take on the classic Singaporean dish of chili crab, Marc Forgione’s appetizer (at his rustic and comfortable TriBeCa restaurant) offers cull lobster in a fiery sea of butter and sriracha, ginger, soy and lobster stock, with a faint note of lime acidity on top. Big hunks of Texas toast come along with, in place of steamed buns. 134 Reade Street (Hudson Street), TriBeCa; (212) 941-9401, marcforgione.com.
DEVIL’S CHICKEN AT TORRISI ITALIAN SPECIALTIES There is a new menu virtually every night at the tiny restaurant that Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone run out of their Little Italy storefront (at which, at lunchtime, you can reliably find the city’s best turkey sandwich). Dozens of dishes have graced them. But the devil’s chicken, a smoky-hot version of the classic pollo alla diavola, with crackling skin and a swab of tangy local yogurt, remains a highlight. 250 Mulberry Street (Prince Street), Little Italy; (212) 965-0955, piginahat.com.
BUTTER-POACHED OYSTERS WITH CELERY ROOT AT COLICCHIO & SONS In a restaurant that offers both the casual ease of its tap room and the more formalized experience of a tasting menu in its main dining room, these sweet little fatties from the à la carte menu were a brilliant demilitarized zone, with celery root that had been cooked and cut into a vegetable rendition of tagliatelle pasta, and a large smack of American caviar on top for seasoning and texture. 85 10th Avenue (15th Street), Chelsea; (212) 400-6699, colicchioandsons.com.
ARROZ CON PATO AT NUELA Giant, shareable dishes are the chef Adam Schop’s great strength at this nightclubby Latinate restaurant. And nowhere is his skill more apparent than with this big duck paella, served with foie gras, duck confit, seared breast, a pile of gizzards and a massive fried duck egg on a plate the size of a manhole cover: grandiose peasant food in a nightclub restaurant in the greatest city on earth. 43 West 24th Street, Flatiron district; (212) 929-1200, nuelany.com.
HETE BLIKSEM AT VANDAAG Phillip Kirschen-Clark, the chef at this spare and elegant Netherlandish restaurant, brings a firm understanding of the intersection between sweet and savory to this side dish to lunchtime sandwiches and evening hen. “Hot lightning” is how the words translate from the Dutch: little fried fingerling potatoes combined with smoked bacon and a tiny dice of tart apples, all of it glossed in stroop, a velvety syrup made of sugar, butter, cream and molasses, then flavored with juniper, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon. 103 Second Avenue (Sixth Street), East Village; (212) 253-0470, vandaagnyc.com.
CAVATELLI CON VONGOLE AT LINCOLN Opinions abound about whether there should be a $20 million new restaurant on the Lincoln Center campus and, if so, what it should be like and whom it should serve and what they should pay. While you’re discussing that, eat the chef Jonathan Benno’s cavatelli with razor clams, a warm bowl of beautifully prepared pasta the same size as the perfectly cooked clams, with sweet peppers to match and lemon thyme and butter for flavor. The dish leaves people moving their arms as if they were Alan Gilbert at the Philharmonic, calling in the bassoons. Lincoln Center, 142 West 65th Street, Upper West Side; (212) 359-6500, lincolnristorante.com.
SFERA DI CAPRINO, CELERY AND FIG AGRODOLCE AND CELERY SORBET AT DEL POSTO Brooks Headley, the pastry chef at Del Posto, has the appearance of a rock drummer who just fell off the couch. (Until he started cooking, in fact, that was his job.) But he makes dessert like a beautiful demon, and his little goat-cheesecake spheres, rolled in salted bread crumbs made slick with olive oil, with a sweet-and-sour mixture of celery and figs, and a football of celery sorbet, were hands-down the best dessert I ate this year. Check, please! 85 10th Avenue (16th Street); (212) 497-8090; delposto.com.
December 28, 2010
Guacamole de Frutas
Adapted from Julian Medina, Toloache, Manhattan
Time: 10 minutes
1 tablespoon finely diced sweet onion, like Vidalia
1 teaspoon finely diced seeded jalapeño pepper
1 teaspoon lime juice
Kosher salt
2 tablespoons finely diced peeled Granny Smith apple
2 tablespoons finely diced peeled Asian pear
2 tablespoons dried cranberries
1 teaspoon thinly sliced basil, preferably Thai
2 ripe Haas avocados
1 tablespoon fresh pomegranate seeds.
1. In a nonreactive mixing bowl, combine onion, jalapeño, lime juice and a pinch salt. Mix well, and add the apple, pear, cranberries and basil. Mix again.
2. Cut the avocados in half, scoop out the pulp and mash it with the ingredients in the bowl. Adjust salt to taste. Transfer to a serving bowl and top with pomegranate seeds. If desired, serve with warm corn tortillas or chips.
Yield: About 1 1/2 cups (4 servings).
Roasted Grapefruit
Adapted from Nate Appleman, Pulino’s Bar & Pizzeria, Manhattan
Time: 15 minutes
1 grapefruit
1/3 cup muscovado sugar
2 teaspoons finely chopped mint.
1. Cut the grapefruit in half and thoroughly loosen all sections with a knife. Dry the cut surface with a paper towel.
2. Put the sugar in a 10-inch heavy skillet and place over medium-high heat. Stir until the sugar melts and darkens slightly, about 2 minutes; do not let it burn. Spread it across the pan (it will not coat evenly) and immediately add the grapefruit halves, cut sides down.
3. Move the grapefruit in the pan to coat the surface. Using tongs or two spoons, transfer to serving dishes, cut sides up. Sprinkle with mint and serve immediately.
Yield: 2 servings.
A Critic’s Choice of Restaurant Newcomers By SAM SIFTON
December 28, 2010
A Critic’s Choice of Restaurant Newcomers By SAM SIFTON
FOLLOWING is a list of my favorite new restaurants among those that I reviewed in 2010. They are presented in alphabetical order. But Torrisi was awesome.
ABC KITCHEN Jean-Georges Vongerichten opened a greenish, market-driven restaurant on the ground floor of ABC Carpet & Home. And it turned out to be great! 35 East 18th Street; , abckitchennyc.com.
THE BRESLIN The evolution of the gastropub, and the chef April Bloomfield’s triumph of fat, flavor and defiant British cooking. 16 West 29th Street (Broadway); (212) 679-1939, thebreslin.com.
CASA LEVER An elegant Italian restaurant well suited to adults, set within the beauty of Lever House, beneath copious Warhols. 390 Park Avenue (53rd Street), Midtown; (212) 888-2700, casalever.com.
COLICCHIO & SONS The taproom is best for beer and sandwiches. But if you can take advantage of Tom Colicchio cooking a tasting menu in the main dining room? That’s aces. 85 10th Avenue (15th Street), Chelsea; (212) 400-6699, colicchioandsons.com.
FATTY ’CUE American barbecue technique is married to the flavors of Southeast Asia. The congregation cheers. 91 South Sixth Street (Bedford Avenue), Williamsburg, Brooklyn; (718) 599-3090, fattycue.com.
KIN SHOP A Thai-inspired restaurant from Harold Dieterle, calm and adult, the sort of place everyone wishes to have in the neighborhood. 469 Sixth Avenue (West 11th Street), Greenwich Village; (212) 675-4295, kinshopnyc.com.
MAIALINO Danny Meyer’s Romanish trattoria in the Gramercy Park Hotel, with excellent pig cooking from the chef Nick Anderer. 2 Lexington Avenue (21st Street), Gramercy Park; (212) 777-2410, maialinonyc.com.
OSTERIA MORINI A church of Emilia-Romagna, consecrated in butter and cream, worth visiting once at least. 218 Lafayette Street (Spring Street), SoHo; (212) 965-8777, osteriamorini.com.
RECETTE A casual West Village dining room belies Jesse Schenker’s immense culinary ambition. 328 West 12th Street (Greenwich Street), Greenwich Village; (212) 414-3000, recettenyc.com.
TORRISI ITALIAN SPECIALTIES Italian-American food best understood as a first album from a duo — Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone — who should properly end up as big, big stars. 250 Mulberry Street (Prince Street), Little Italy; (212) 965-0955, piginahat.com.
A Critic’s Choice of Restaurant Newcomers By SAM SIFTON
FOLLOWING is a list of my favorite new restaurants among those that I reviewed in 2010. They are presented in alphabetical order. But Torrisi was awesome.
ABC KITCHEN Jean-Georges Vongerichten opened a greenish, market-driven restaurant on the ground floor of ABC Carpet & Home. And it turned out to be great! 35 East 18th Street; , abckitchennyc.com.
THE BRESLIN The evolution of the gastropub, and the chef April Bloomfield’s triumph of fat, flavor and defiant British cooking. 16 West 29th Street (Broadway); (212) 679-1939, thebreslin.com.
CASA LEVER An elegant Italian restaurant well suited to adults, set within the beauty of Lever House, beneath copious Warhols. 390 Park Avenue (53rd Street), Midtown; (212) 888-2700, casalever.com.
COLICCHIO & SONS The taproom is best for beer and sandwiches. But if you can take advantage of Tom Colicchio cooking a tasting menu in the main dining room? That’s aces. 85 10th Avenue (15th Street), Chelsea; (212) 400-6699, colicchioandsons.com.
FATTY ’CUE American barbecue technique is married to the flavors of Southeast Asia. The congregation cheers. 91 South Sixth Street (Bedford Avenue), Williamsburg, Brooklyn; (718) 599-3090, fattycue.com.
KIN SHOP A Thai-inspired restaurant from Harold Dieterle, calm and adult, the sort of place everyone wishes to have in the neighborhood. 469 Sixth Avenue (West 11th Street), Greenwich Village; (212) 675-4295, kinshopnyc.com.
MAIALINO Danny Meyer’s Romanish trattoria in the Gramercy Park Hotel, with excellent pig cooking from the chef Nick Anderer. 2 Lexington Avenue (21st Street), Gramercy Park; (212) 777-2410, maialinonyc.com.
OSTERIA MORINI A church of Emilia-Romagna, consecrated in butter and cream, worth visiting once at least. 218 Lafayette Street (Spring Street), SoHo; (212) 965-8777, osteriamorini.com.
RECETTE A casual West Village dining room belies Jesse Schenker’s immense culinary ambition. 328 West 12th Street (Greenwich Street), Greenwich Village; (212) 414-3000, recettenyc.com.
TORRISI ITALIAN SPECIALTIES Italian-American food best understood as a first album from a duo — Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone — who should properly end up as big, big stars. 250 Mulberry Street (Prince Street), Little Italy; (212) 965-0955, piginahat.com.
Inexpensive Restaurants That Stood Out in 2010 By THE NEW YORK TIMES
December 28, 2010
Inexpensive Restaurants That Stood Out in 2010 By THE NEW YORK TIMES
THE best of the casual restaurants reviewed this year proved that delicious doesn’t have to mean expensive.
AYADA This is a serious Thai restaurant that makes no concessions to Western palates. The menu is encyclopedic; the waitresses are patient. Put yourself in the gentle but firm hands of the chef and owner, Duangjai Thammasat (known as Kitty), and she’ll guide you toward the best dishes, complex orchestrations of tart and sweet, salt and burn. (Reviewed by Ligaya Mishan) 77-08 Woodside Avenue (77th Avenue), Elmhurst, Queens; .
BAOHAUS For $4, you get a lily-white bun (the bao) brimming with Niman Ranch pork belly, glossy with fat and topped with the classic Taiwanese condiments: sweet pulverized peanuts, pickled mustard greens and cilantro. Dissenters will quibble that you can get it for less in Chinatown. Not with this quality can you. (Ligaya Mishan) 137 Rivington Street (Norfolk Street), Lower East Side; (646) 684-3835, baohausnyc.com.
CAFE ‘AT YOUR MOTHER-IN-LAW’ In this sunny space two blocks from the boardwalk you can order an amalgam of Eastern European, Korean and Uzbek dishes from Russian-speaking ethnic Koreans hailing from Tashkent. (Dave Cook) 3071 Brighton Fourth Street (Brighton Beach Avenue), Brighton Beach, Brooklyn; (718) 942-4088.
CAMPO DE’ FIORI The dough for the pizza is a result of 15 years of experiments by an engineer specializing in the molecular properties of flour. But you can have a beguiling meal here and never taste a pie. The food is plain-spoken and appealingly rough around the edges. Although the vibe could be cozier, it’s worth lingering awhile. (Ligaya Mishan) 187 Fifth Avenue (Berkeley Place), Park Slope, Brooklyn; (347) 763-0933, pizzacampodefiori.com.
CASTELLO PLAN Quirky and wonderful wines are paired with delicious small plates, cured meats and cheeses at this wine bar. Relax in the dark dining room, or on the side deck when warm weather returns, grazing until late at night. (Betsy Andrews) 1213 Cortelyou Road (Argyle Road), Ditmas Park, Brooklyn; (718) 856-8888, thecastelloplan.com.
THE COMMODORE A dive bar with great food that feels as if it’s been around forever. The Commodore’s kitchen turns out a vaguely Southern array of crunchy, spicy, greasy, gooey and salty dishes that push all the right buttons when you’re rolling through your third drink of the night. (Oliver Strand) 366 Metropolitan Avenue (Havemeyer Street), Williamsburg, Brooklyn; (718) 218-7632, commodorebar.com
DOS TOROS The food here is simple and succulent, stripped-down cooking served in spartan conditions. The restaurant will bring to mind the sort of fresh, quick and cheap eating found at Mexican joints in the San Francisco Bay Area. (Oliver Strand) 137 Fourth Avenue (13th Street); (212) 677-7300, dostorosnyc.com.
DOSA GARDEN The deep, smoky, vibrant curries of Chettinad, in the southern Indian state Tamil Nadu, are featured here, along with a range of dosai with a rich, deep sambar sauce. Flavors build in fragrant waves, from sweet to spiced and earthy to a subtle, integrating chili burn. It’s all delicious. (Betsy Andrews) 323 Victory Boulevard (Cebra Boulevard), Staten Island; (718) 420-0919, dosagardenny.com.
HECHO EN DUMBO Daniel Mena, the chef, is at his best when he takes the big flavors of his native Mexico City and strips a dish down to its fundamentals. He believes in his ingredients; a dish like the short-rib tacos doesn’t need anything more than a squeeze of lime. The place is serene in the day, a scene at night, but food like this is worth standing and shouting for. (Oliver Strand) 354 Bowery (East Fourth Street), East Village; (212) 937-4245, hechoendumbo.com.
HILL COUNTRY CHICKEN Hill Country proved that great Texas barbecue can exist in Manhattan. Now the owners repeat the feat (down the street) with fried chicken and other Southern dishes. (Julia Moskin) 1123 Broadway (25th Street); (212) 257-6446, hillcountrychicken.com.
KUTI’S The chef and owner, Abdhul Traore, marries West African and Middle Eastern flavors from his native Ivory Coast, and insinuates a few French techniques in dishes like shrimp piri-piri and what must be the city’s only escargot panino. (Dave Cook) 355 West 116th Street (between Manhattan and Morningside Avenues); (212) 222-1127.
MEXICUE Winning combinations and smart deployment of sauces make it worth seeking out this truck offering Mexican sliders and gorgeous artisanal tacos. (Betsy Andrews) For locations: (260) 639-4283, mexicueny.com.
THE NORTHERN SPY FOOD COMPANY The menu at this Greenmarket-driven restaurant reads like a roster of favorite snacks and midnight feasts, executed with a precision honed in high-end kitchens. (Ligaya Mishan) 511 East 12th Street (Avenue A), East Village; (212) 228-5100, northernspyfoodco.com.
NO. 7 SUB Visit this takeout shop for subs stuffed with ceviche or broccoli; roast beef layered with pickled blueberries; or lamb with peanut butter, all with extras like candied wasabi, papadums, fried lemon or fermented soybean paste. Results, for the most part, are exhilaratingly delicious. (Ligaya Mishan) 1188 Broadway (29th Street); (212) 532-1680, no7sub.com.
PIES ’N’ THIGHS This restaurant’s new home is a Brooklynite’s imaginary version of a meat-and-three in the South. The thighs are as crunchy and as golden as ever, and the pies are honest, American and sweet. They’re enough to restore the faith of anybody who’s eaten too many fancy desserts that look like Frank Gehry’s rejected sketches. (Pete Wells) 166 South Fourth Street (Driggs Avenue), Williamsburg, Brooklyn; (347) 529-6090, piesnthighs.tumblr.com.
Inexpensive Restaurants That Stood Out in 2010 By THE NEW YORK TIMES
THE best of the casual restaurants reviewed this year proved that delicious doesn’t have to mean expensive.
AYADA This is a serious Thai restaurant that makes no concessions to Western palates. The menu is encyclopedic; the waitresses are patient. Put yourself in the gentle but firm hands of the chef and owner, Duangjai Thammasat (known as Kitty), and she’ll guide you toward the best dishes, complex orchestrations of tart and sweet, salt and burn. (Reviewed by Ligaya Mishan) 77-08 Woodside Avenue (77th Avenue), Elmhurst, Queens; .
BAOHAUS For $4, you get a lily-white bun (the bao) brimming with Niman Ranch pork belly, glossy with fat and topped with the classic Taiwanese condiments: sweet pulverized peanuts, pickled mustard greens and cilantro. Dissenters will quibble that you can get it for less in Chinatown. Not with this quality can you. (Ligaya Mishan) 137 Rivington Street (Norfolk Street), Lower East Side; (646) 684-3835, baohausnyc.com.
CAFE ‘AT YOUR MOTHER-IN-LAW’ In this sunny space two blocks from the boardwalk you can order an amalgam of Eastern European, Korean and Uzbek dishes from Russian-speaking ethnic Koreans hailing from Tashkent. (Dave Cook) 3071 Brighton Fourth Street (Brighton Beach Avenue), Brighton Beach, Brooklyn; (718) 942-4088.
CAMPO DE’ FIORI The dough for the pizza is a result of 15 years of experiments by an engineer specializing in the molecular properties of flour. But you can have a beguiling meal here and never taste a pie. The food is plain-spoken and appealingly rough around the edges. Although the vibe could be cozier, it’s worth lingering awhile. (Ligaya Mishan) 187 Fifth Avenue (Berkeley Place), Park Slope, Brooklyn; (347) 763-0933, pizzacampodefiori.com.
CASTELLO PLAN Quirky and wonderful wines are paired with delicious small plates, cured meats and cheeses at this wine bar. Relax in the dark dining room, or on the side deck when warm weather returns, grazing until late at night. (Betsy Andrews) 1213 Cortelyou Road (Argyle Road), Ditmas Park, Brooklyn; (718) 856-8888, thecastelloplan.com.
THE COMMODORE A dive bar with great food that feels as if it’s been around forever. The Commodore’s kitchen turns out a vaguely Southern array of crunchy, spicy, greasy, gooey and salty dishes that push all the right buttons when you’re rolling through your third drink of the night. (Oliver Strand) 366 Metropolitan Avenue (Havemeyer Street), Williamsburg, Brooklyn; (718) 218-7632, commodorebar.com
DOS TOROS The food here is simple and succulent, stripped-down cooking served in spartan conditions. The restaurant will bring to mind the sort of fresh, quick and cheap eating found at Mexican joints in the San Francisco Bay Area. (Oliver Strand) 137 Fourth Avenue (13th Street); (212) 677-7300, dostorosnyc.com.
DOSA GARDEN The deep, smoky, vibrant curries of Chettinad, in the southern Indian state Tamil Nadu, are featured here, along with a range of dosai with a rich, deep sambar sauce. Flavors build in fragrant waves, from sweet to spiced and earthy to a subtle, integrating chili burn. It’s all delicious. (Betsy Andrews) 323 Victory Boulevard (Cebra Boulevard), Staten Island; (718) 420-0919, dosagardenny.com.
HECHO EN DUMBO Daniel Mena, the chef, is at his best when he takes the big flavors of his native Mexico City and strips a dish down to its fundamentals. He believes in his ingredients; a dish like the short-rib tacos doesn’t need anything more than a squeeze of lime. The place is serene in the day, a scene at night, but food like this is worth standing and shouting for. (Oliver Strand) 354 Bowery (East Fourth Street), East Village; (212) 937-4245, hechoendumbo.com.
HILL COUNTRY CHICKEN Hill Country proved that great Texas barbecue can exist in Manhattan. Now the owners repeat the feat (down the street) with fried chicken and other Southern dishes. (Julia Moskin) 1123 Broadway (25th Street); (212) 257-6446, hillcountrychicken.com.
KUTI’S The chef and owner, Abdhul Traore, marries West African and Middle Eastern flavors from his native Ivory Coast, and insinuates a few French techniques in dishes like shrimp piri-piri and what must be the city’s only escargot panino. (Dave Cook) 355 West 116th Street (between Manhattan and Morningside Avenues); (212) 222-1127.
MEXICUE Winning combinations and smart deployment of sauces make it worth seeking out this truck offering Mexican sliders and gorgeous artisanal tacos. (Betsy Andrews) For locations: (260) 639-4283, mexicueny.com.
THE NORTHERN SPY FOOD COMPANY The menu at this Greenmarket-driven restaurant reads like a roster of favorite snacks and midnight feasts, executed with a precision honed in high-end kitchens. (Ligaya Mishan) 511 East 12th Street (Avenue A), East Village; (212) 228-5100, northernspyfoodco.com.
NO. 7 SUB Visit this takeout shop for subs stuffed with ceviche or broccoli; roast beef layered with pickled blueberries; or lamb with peanut butter, all with extras like candied wasabi, papadums, fried lemon or fermented soybean paste. Results, for the most part, are exhilaratingly delicious. (Ligaya Mishan) 1188 Broadway (29th Street); (212) 532-1680, no7sub.com.
PIES ’N’ THIGHS This restaurant’s new home is a Brooklynite’s imaginary version of a meat-and-three in the South. The thighs are as crunchy and as golden as ever, and the pies are honest, American and sweet. They’re enough to restore the faith of anybody who’s eaten too many fancy desserts that look like Frank Gehry’s rejected sketches. (Pete Wells) 166 South Fourth Street (Driggs Avenue), Williamsburg, Brooklyn; (347) 529-6090, piesnthighs.tumblr.com.
Monday, December 27, 2010
The Worst of the Madness November 11, 2010 by Anne Applebaum
"
Welcome (sign in | sign up)
Shopping cart (0 items) |
RSSFacebookTwitter
The New York Review of BooksNYRB Logo
Advanced Search
* Home
o Events/Calendar
* Current Issue
* NYRblog
o Podcasts
* Print Archive
* Classifieds
* Shop
o Illustration Galleries
* Subscribe
o Gift Subscriptions
o Renew Subscription
o Online Edition
o Academic/Institutional
o Newsletters
o Subscriber Alert
* books button
The Worst of the Madness November 11, 2010 by Anne Applebaum
Font Size: A A A
E-mail Print Share More by Anne Applebaum
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
by Timothy Snyder
Basic Books, 524 pages, $29.95
Stalin's Genocides
by Norman M. Naimark
Princeton University Press, 163 pp., $26.95
applebaum_1-111110.jpg
Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Art Library
Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, center, arriving in Berlin to meet with Adolf Hitler, November 12, 1940. At front left are German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
Once, in an attempt to explain the history of his country to outsiders, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz described the impact of war, occupation, and the Holocaust on ordinary morality. Mass violence, he explained, could shatter a man's sense of natural justice. In normal times,
had he stumbled upon a corpse on the street, he would have called the police. A crowd would have gathered, and much talk and comment would have ensued. Now he knows he must avoid the dark body lying in the gutter, and refrain from asking unnecessary questions….
Murder became ordinary during wartime, wrote Miłosz, and was even regarded as legitimate if it was carried out on behalf of the resistance. In the name of patriotism, young boys from law-abiding, middle-class families became hardened criminals, thugs for whom "the killing of a man presents no great moral problem." Theft became ordinary too, as did falsehood and fabrication. People learned to sleep through sounds that would once have roused the whole neighborhood: the rattle of machine-gun fire, the cries of men in agony, the cursing of the policeman dragging the neighbors away.
For all of these reasons, Miłosz explained, "the man of the East cannot take Americans [or other Westerners] seriously." Because they hadn't undergone such experiences, they couldn't seem to fathom what they meant, and couldn't seem to imagine how they had happened either. "Their resultant lack of imagination," he concluded, "is appalling."1
But Miłosz's bitter analysis did not go far enough. Almost sixty years after the poet wrote those words, it is no longer enough to say that we Westerners lack imagination. Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian whose past work has ranged from Habsburg Vienna to Stalinist Kiev, takes the point one step further. In Bloodlands, a brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century, he argues that we still lack any real knowledge of what happened in the eastern half of Europe in the twentieth century. And he is right: if we are American, we think "the war" was something that started with Pearl Harbor in 1941 and ended with the atomic bomb in 1945. If we are British, we remember the Blitz of 1940 (and indeed are commemorating it energetically this year) and the liberation of Belsen. If we are French, we remember Vichy and the Resistance. If we are Dutch we think of Anne Frank. Even if we are German we know only a part of the story.
The NYRB Book Club
Advertisement
Snyder's ambition is to persuade the West—and the rest of the world—to see the war in a broader perspective. He does so by disputing popular assumptions about victims, death tolls, and killing methods—of which more in a moment—but above all about dates and geography. The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor. Snyder's "bloodlands," which others have called "borderlands," run from Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia (see map on page 10). This is the region that experienced not one but two—and sometimes three—wartime occupations. This is also the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical destruction.
More to the point, this is the region that experienced the worst of both Stalin's and Hitler's ideological madness. During the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, the lethal armies and vicious secret policemen of two totalitarian states marched back and forth across these territories, each time bringing about profound ethnic and political changes. In this period, the city of Lwów was occupied twice by the Red Army and once by the Wehrmacht. After the war ended it was called L'viv, not Lwów, it was no longer in eastern Poland but in western Ukraine, and its Polish and Jewish pre-war population had been murdered or deported and replaced by ethnic Ukrainians from the surrounding countryside. In this same period, the Ukrainian city of Odessa was occupied first by the Romanian army and then by the Wehrmacht before being reoccupied by the Soviet Union. Each time power changed hands there were battles and sieges, and each time an army retreated from the city it blew up the harbor or massacred Jews. Similar stories can be told about almost any place in the region.
This region was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europe—killing that began not in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but in 1933, with the famine in Ukraine. Between 1933 and 1945, fourteen million people died there, not in combat but because someone made a deliberate decision to murder them. These deaths took place in the bloodlands, and not accidentally so: "Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow," writes Snyder, "but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between."
Beginning in the 1930s, Stalin conducted his first utopian agricultural experiment in Ukraine, where he collectivized the land and conducted a "war" for grain with the kulaks, the "wealthy" peasants (whose wealth sometimes consisted of a single cow). His campaign rapidly evolved into a war against Ukrainian peasant culture itself, culminating in a mass famine in 1933. In that same year, Hitler came to power and began dreaming of creating Lebensraum, living space, for German colonists in Poland and Ukraine, a project that could only be realized by eliminating the people who lived there.2 In 1941, the Nazis also devised the Hunger Plan, a scheme to feed German soldiers and civilians by starving Polish and Soviet citizens. Once again, the Nazis decided, the produce of Ukraine's collective farms would be confiscated and redistributed: "Socialism in one country would be supplanted by socialism for the German race."
Not accidentally, the fourteen million victims of these ethnic and political schemes were mostly not Russians or Germans, but the peoples who inhabited the lands in between. Stalin and Hitler shared a contempt for the very notions of Polish, Ukrainian, and Baltic independence, and jointly strove to eliminate the elites of those countries. Following their invasion of western Poland in 1939, the Germans arrested and murdered Polish professors, priests, intellectuals, and politicians. Following their invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, the Soviet secret police arrested and murdered Polish professors, priests, intellectuals, and politicians. A few months later, Stalin ordered the murder of some 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn and in other forests nearby as well.
Stalin and Hitler also shared a hatred for the Jews who had long flourished in this region, and who were far more numerous there than in Germany or anywhere else in Western Europe. Snyder points out that Jews were fewer than one percent of the German population when Hitler came to power in 1933, and many did manage to flee. Hitler's vision of a "Jew-free" Europe could thus only be realized when the Wehrmacht invaded the bloodlands, which is where most of the Jews of Europe actually lived. Of the 5.4 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, four million were from the bloodlands. The vast majority of the rest—including the 165,000 German Jews who did not escape—were taken to the bloodlands to be murdered. After the war, Stalin became paranoid about those Soviet Jews who remained, in part because they wanted to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust. At the end of his life he purged and arrested many thousands of them, though he died too soon to carry out another mass murder.
Above all, this was the region where Nazism and Soviet communism clashed. Although they had signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in 1939, agreeing to divide the bloodlands between them, Stalin and Hitler also came to hate each other. This hatred proved fatal to both German and Soviet soldiers who had the bad luck to become prisoners of war. Both dictators treated captured enemies with deadly utilitarianism. For the Germans, Soviet POWs were expendable: they consumed calories needed by others and, unlike Western POWs, were considered to be subhuman. And so they were deliberately starved to death in hideous "camps" in Poland, Russia, and Belarus that were not camps but death zones. Penned behind barbed wire, often in open fields without food, medicine, shelter, or bedding, they died in extraordinary numbers and with great rapidity. On any given day in the autumn of 1941, as many Soviet POWs died as did British and American POWs during the entire war. In total more than three million perished, mostly within a period of a few months.
In essence the Soviet attitude toward German POWs was no different. When, following the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army suddenly found itself with 90,000 prisoners, it also put them in open fields without any food or shelter. Over the next few months, at least half a million German and Axis soldiers would die in Soviet captivity. But as the Red Army began to win the war, it tried harder to keep captives alive, the better to deploy them as forced laborers. According to Soviet statistics, 2.3 million German soldiers and about a million of their allies (from Romania, Italy, Hungary, and Austria, but also France and Holland) eventually wound up in the labor camps of the Gulag, along with some 600,000 Japanese whose fate has been almost forgotten in their native land.3
Some were released after the war and others were released in the 1950s. There wasn't necessarily any political logic to these decisions. At one point in 1947, at the height of the postwar famine, the NKVD unexpectedly released several hundred thousand war prisoners. There was no political explanation: the Soviet leadership simply hadn't enough food to keep them all alive. And in the postwar world there were pressures—most of all from the USSR's new East German client state—to keep them alive. The Nazis had operated without such constraints.
Though some of the anecdotes and statistics may be surprising to those who don't know this part of the world, scholars will find nothing in Bloodlands that is startlingly new. Historians of the region certainly know that three million Soviet soldiers starved to death in Nazi camps, that most of the Holocaust took place in the East, and that Hitler's plans for Ukraine were no different from Stalin's. Snyder's original contribution is to treat all of these episodes—the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, Stalin's mass executions, the planned starvation of Soviet POWs, postwar ethnic cleansing—as different facets of the same phenomenon. Instead of studying Nazi atrocities or Soviet atrocities separately, as many others have done, he looks at them together. Yet Snyder does not exactly compare the two systems either. His intention, rather, is to show that the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing than either might have carried out alone.
Applebaum-Map-111110.jpg
Mike King
Europe in 1933. The shaded areas are what Timothy Snyder calls the bloodlands. Anne Applebaum writes, 'Between 1933 and 1945, fourteen million people died there, not in combat but because someone made a deliberate decision to murder them.'
He also wants to show that this interaction had consequences for the inhabitants of the region. From a great distance in time and space, we in the West have the luxury of discussing the two systems in isolation, comparing and contrasting, judging and analyzing, engaging in theoretical arguments about which was worse. But people who lived under both of them, in Poland or in Ukraine, experienced them as part of a single historical moment. Snyder explains:
The Nazi and Soviet regimes were sometimes allies, as in the joint occupation of Poland [from 1939–1941]. They sometimes held compatible goals as foes: as when Stalin chose not to aid the rebels in Warsaw in 1944 [during the Warsaw uprising], thereby allowing the Germans to kill people who would later have resisted communist rule…. Often the Germans and the Soviets goaded each other into escalations that cost more lives than the policies of either state by itself would have.
In some cases, the atrocities carried out by one power eased the way for the other. When the Nazis marched into western Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic states in 1941, they entered a region from which the Soviet secret police had deported hundreds of thousands of people in the previous few months, and shot thousands of prisoners in the previous few days. The conquering Germans were thus welcomed by some as "liberators" who might save the population from a genuinely murderous regime. They were also able to mobilize popular anger at these recent atrocities, and in some places to direct some of that anger at local Jews who had, in the public imagination—and sometimes in reality—collaborated with the Soviet Union. It is no accident that the acceleration of the Holocaust occurred at precisely this moment.
To look at the history of mid-twentieth-century Europe in this way also has consequences for Westerners. Among other things, Snyder asks his readers to think again about the most famous films and photographs taken at Belsen and Buchenwald by the British and American soldiers who liberated those camps. These pictures, which show starving, emaciated people, walking skeletons in striped uniforms, stacks of corpses piled up like wood, have become the most enduring images of the Holocaust. Yet the people in these photographs were mostly not Jews: they were forced laborers who had been kept alive because the German war machine needed them to produce weapons and uniforms. Only when the German state began to collapse in early 1945 did they begin to starve to death in large numbers.
The vast majority of Hitler's victims, Jewish and otherwise, never saw a concentration camp. Although about a million people died because they were sent to do forced labor in German concentration camps, some ten million died in killing fields in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia—that means they were taken to the woods, sometimes with the assistance of their neighbors, and shot—as well as in German starvation zones and German gas chambers. These gas chambers were not "camps," Snyder argues, though they were sometimes adjacent to camps, as at Auschwitz:
Under German rule, the concentration camps and the death factories operated under different principles. A sentence to the concentration camp Belsen was one thing, a transport to the death factory Bełz·ec something else. The first meant hunger and labor, but also the likelihood of survival; the second meant immediate and certain death by asphyxiation. This, ironically, is why people remember Belsen and forget Bełz·ec.
He makes a similar point about Stalin's victims, arguing that although a million died in the Soviet Gulag between 1933 and 1945, an additional six million died from politically induced Soviet famines and in Soviet killing fields. I happen to think Snyder's numbers are a little low—the figure for Gulag deaths is certainly higher than a million—but the proportions are probably correct. In the period between 1930 and 1953, the number of people who died in labor camps—from hunger, overwork, and cold, while living in wooden barracks behind barbed wire—is far lower than the number who died violently from machine-gun fire combined with the number who starved to death because their village was deprived of food.
The image we have of the prisoner in wooden shoes, dragging himself to work every morning, losing his humanity day by day—the image also created in the brilliant writings of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn—is in this sense somewhat misleading. In fact, prisoners who could work had at least a chance of staying alive. Prisoners who were too weak to work, or for whom work could not be organized because of war and chaos, were far more likely to die. The 5.4 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust mostly died instantly, in gas chambers or mobile vans or in silent forests. We have no photographs of them, or of their corpses.
The chronological and geographical arguments presented in Bloodlands also complicate the debate over the proper use of the word "genocide." As not everybody now remembers, this word (from the Greek genos, tribe, and the French -cide) was coined in 1943 by a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, Raphael Lemkin, who had long been trying to draw the attention of the international community to what he at first called "the crime of barbarity." In 1933, inspired by news of the Armenian massacre, he had proposed that the League of Nations treat mass murder committed "out of hatred towards a racial, religious or social collectivity" as an international crime. After he fled Nazi-occupied Poland in 1940, Lemkin intensified his efforts. He persuaded the Nuremburg prosecutors to use the word "genocide" during the trials, though not in the verdict. He also got the new United Nations to draft a Convention on Genocide. Finally, after much debate, the General Assembly passed this convention in 1948.
As the Stanford historian Norman Naimark explains in Stalin's Genocides, the UN's definition of genocide was deliberately narrow: "Acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." This was because Soviet diplomats had demanded the exclusion of any reference to social, economic, and political groups. Had they left these categories in, prosecution of the USSR for the murder of aristocrats (a social group), kulaks (an economic group), or Trotskyites (a political group) would have been possible.
Although Lemkin himself continued to advocate a broader definition of the term, the idea that the word "genocide" can refer only to the mass murder of an ethnic group has stuck. In fact, until recently the term was used almost exclusively to refer to the Holocaust, the one "genocide" that is recognized as such by almost everybody: the international community, the former Allies, even the former perpetrators.
Perhaps because of that unusually universal recognition, the word has more recently acquired almost magical qualities. Nations nowadays campaign for their historical tragedies to be recognized as "genocide," and the term has become a political weapon both between and within countries. The disagreement between Armenians and Turks over whether the massacre of Armenians after World War I was "genocide" has been the subject of a resolution introduced in the US Congress. The leaders of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine campaigned to have the Ukrainian famine recognized as "genocide" in international courts (and in January 2010, a court in Kiev did convict Stalin and other high officials of "genocide" against the Ukrainian nation). But the campaign was deliberately dropped when their more pro-Russian (or post-Soviet) opponents came to power. They have since deleted a link to the genocide campaign from the presidential website.
As the story of Lemkin's genocide campaign well illustrates, this discussion of the proper use of the word has also been dogged by politics from the beginning. The reluctance of intellectuals on the left to condemn communism; the fact that Stalin was allied with Roosevelt and Churchill; the existence of German historians who tried to downplay the significance of the Holocaust by comparing it to Soviet crimes; all of that meant that, until recently, it was politically incorrect in the West to admit that we defeated one genocidal dictator with the help of another. Only now, with the publication of so much material from Soviet and Central European archives, has the extent of the Soviet Union's mass murders become better known in the West. In recent years, some in the former Soviet sphere of influence—most notably in the Baltic states and Ukraine—have begun to use the word "genocide" in legal documents to describe the Soviet Union's mass killings too.
Naimark's short book is a polemical contribution to this debate. Though he acknowledges the dubious political history of the UN convention, he goes on to argue that even under the current definition, Stalin's attack on the kulaks and on the Ukrainian peasants should count as genocide. So should Stalin's targeted campaigns against particular ethnic groups. At different times the Soviet secret police hunted down, arrested, and murdered ethnic Poles, Germans, and Koreans who happened to be living in the USSR, and of course they murdered 20,000 Polish officers within a few weeks. A number of small nations, notably the Chechens, were also arrested and deported en masse during the war: men, women, children, and grandparents were put on trains, and sent to live in Central Asia, where they were meant to die and eventually disappear as a nation. A similar fate met the Crimean Tatars.
Like Snyder's, Naimark's work has also ranged widely, from his groundbreaking book on the Soviet occupation of East Germany to studies of ethnic cleansing. As a result his argument is authoritative, clear, and hard to dispute. Yet if we take the perspective offered in Bloodlands seriously, we also have to ask whether the whole genocide debate itself—and in particular the long-standing argument over whether Stalin's murders "qualify"—is not a red herring. If Stalin's and Hitler's mass murders were different but not separate, and if neither would have happened in quite the same way without the other, then how can we talk about whether one is genocide and the other is not?
To the people who actually experienced both tyrannies, such definitions hardly mattered. Did the Polish merchant care whether he died because he was a Jew or because he was a capitalist? Did the starving Ukrainian child care whether she had been deprived of food in order to create a Communist paradise or in order to provide calories for the soldiers of the German Reich? Perhaps we need a new word, one that is broader than the current definition of genocide and means, simply, "mass murder carried out for political reasons." Or perhaps we should simply agree that the word "genocide" includes within its definition the notions of deliberate starvation as well as gas chambers and concentration camps, that it includes the mass murder of social groups as well as ethnic groups and be done with it.
applebaum_2-111110.jpg
Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos
Refugees at a transit camp, Dessau, Germany, April 1945
Finally, the arguments of Bloodlands also complicate the modern notion of memory—memory, that is, as opposed to history. It is true, for example, that the modern German state "remembers" the Holocaust—in official documents, in public debates, in monuments, in school textbooks—and is often rightly lauded for doing so. But how comprehensive is this memory? How many Germans "remember" the deaths of three million Soviet POWs? How many know or care that the secret treaty signed between Hitler and Stalin not only condemned the inhabitants of western Poland to deportation, hunger, and often death in slave labor camps, but also condemned the inhabitants of eastern Poland to deportation, hunger, and often death in Soviet exile? The Katyn massacre really is, in this sense, partially Germany's responsibility: without Germany's collusion with the Soviet Union, it would not have happened. Yet modern Germany's very real sense of guilt about the Holocaust does not often extend to Soviet soldiers or even to Poles.
If we remember the twentieth century for what it actually was, and not for what we imagine it to have been, the misuse of history for national political purposes also becomes more difficult. The modern Russian state often talks about the "twenty million Soviet dead" during World War II as a way of emphasizing its victimhood and martyrdom. But even if we accept that suspiciously large round number, it is still important to acknowledge that the majority of those were not Russians, did not live in modern Russia, and did not necessarily die because of German aggression. It is also important to acknowledge that Soviet citizens were just as likely to die during the war years because of decisions made by Stalin, or because of the interaction between Stalin and Hitler, as they were from the commands of Hitler alone.
For different reasons, the American popular memory of World War II is also due for some revision. In the past, we have sometimes described this as the "good war," at least when contrasted to the morally ambiguous wars that followed. At some level this is understandable: we did fight for human rights in Germany and Japan, we did leave democratic German and Japanese regimes in our wake, and we should be proud of having done so. But it is also true that while we were fighting for democracy and human rights in the lands of Western Europe, we ignored and then forgot what happened further east.
As a result, we liberated one half of Europe at the cost of enslaving the other half for fifty years. We really did win the war against one genocidal dictator with the help of another. There was a happy end for us, but not for everybody. This does not make us bad—there were limitations, reasons, legitimate explanations for what happened. But it does make us less exceptional. And it does make World War II less exceptional, more morally ambiguous, and thus more similar to the wars that followed.
If nothing else, a reassessment of what we know about Europe in the years between 1933 and 1953 could finally cure us of that "lack of imagination" that so appalled Czesław Miłosz almost sixty years ago. When considered in isolation, Auschwitz can be easily compartmentalized, characterized as belonging to a specific place and time, or explained away as the result of Germany's unique history or particular culture. But if Auschwitz was not the only mass atrocity, if mass murder was simultaneously taking place across a multinational landscape and with the support of many different kinds of people, then it is not so easy to compartmentalize or explain away. The more we learn about the twentieth century, the harder it will be to draw easy lessons or make simple judgments about the people who lived through it—and the easier it will be to empathize with and understand them.
Letters
'The Worst of the Madness' December 23, 2010
1.
Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (1953; Penguin, 2001), pp. 26–29. ↩
2.
Typical is the story of a house I own in northwest Poland: intending to "Germanize" the region, the Nazis evicted the Polish owners in 1939 and installed a German family from Lithuania in their place. These Germans were evicted again in 1944, and the house became state property. ↩
3.
These figures come from Richard Overy, Russia's War (Penguin, 1997), p. 297, and from Voennoplennye v SSSR, 1939–1956: dokumenty i materialy , edited by M.M. Zagorul'ko (Moscow: Logos, 2000), pp. 331–333. ↩
Also In This Issue
A Genius for Contempt
Russell Baker e-edition
A Hero of Our Time
Jonathan Mirsky
'A Tremendous Painter'
Sanford Schwartz e-edition
The Real Danger to the Economy
George Soros
Subscribe to the NY Review!
NYRblog
Lilia M. Schwarcz
Rio's New Reality Show
Orhan Pamuk
The Fading Dream of Europe
Michael Tomasky
Obama's Second Act?
Timothy Snyder
Brutality in Belarus
Ian Johnson
Finding the Facts About Mao's Victims
Newsletter Sign Up
News of upcoming issues, contributors, special events, online features, more.
The NYRB Book Club
Advertisement
* Home
* Contact Us
* About
* Subscribe
* Advertise
* University Press Listing
* Independent Press Listing
* Help/FAQ
* Books
* Terms of Use
* Feeds
* Newsletters
Copyright © 1963-2011 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.
"
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/worst-madness/?pagination=false&printpage=true
http://snipurl.com/1rcdeh
Welcome (sign in | sign up)
Shopping cart (0 items) |
RSSFacebookTwitter
The New York Review of BooksNYRB Logo
Advanced Search
* Home
o Events/Calendar
* Current Issue
* NYRblog
o Podcasts
* Print Archive
* Classifieds
* Shop
o Illustration Galleries
* Subscribe
o Gift Subscriptions
o Renew Subscription
o Online Edition
o Academic/Institutional
o Newsletters
o Subscriber Alert
* books button
The Worst of the Madness November 11, 2010 by Anne Applebaum
Font Size: A A A
E-mail Print Share More by Anne Applebaum
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
by Timothy Snyder
Basic Books, 524 pages, $29.95
Stalin's Genocides
by Norman M. Naimark
Princeton University Press, 163 pp., $26.95
applebaum_1-111110.jpg
Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Art Library
Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, center, arriving in Berlin to meet with Adolf Hitler, November 12, 1940. At front left are German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
Once, in an attempt to explain the history of his country to outsiders, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz described the impact of war, occupation, and the Holocaust on ordinary morality. Mass violence, he explained, could shatter a man's sense of natural justice. In normal times,
had he stumbled upon a corpse on the street, he would have called the police. A crowd would have gathered, and much talk and comment would have ensued. Now he knows he must avoid the dark body lying in the gutter, and refrain from asking unnecessary questions….
Murder became ordinary during wartime, wrote Miłosz, and was even regarded as legitimate if it was carried out on behalf of the resistance. In the name of patriotism, young boys from law-abiding, middle-class families became hardened criminals, thugs for whom "the killing of a man presents no great moral problem." Theft became ordinary too, as did falsehood and fabrication. People learned to sleep through sounds that would once have roused the whole neighborhood: the rattle of machine-gun fire, the cries of men in agony, the cursing of the policeman dragging the neighbors away.
For all of these reasons, Miłosz explained, "the man of the East cannot take Americans [or other Westerners] seriously." Because they hadn't undergone such experiences, they couldn't seem to fathom what they meant, and couldn't seem to imagine how they had happened either. "Their resultant lack of imagination," he concluded, "is appalling."1
But Miłosz's bitter analysis did not go far enough. Almost sixty years after the poet wrote those words, it is no longer enough to say that we Westerners lack imagination. Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian whose past work has ranged from Habsburg Vienna to Stalinist Kiev, takes the point one step further. In Bloodlands, a brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century, he argues that we still lack any real knowledge of what happened in the eastern half of Europe in the twentieth century. And he is right: if we are American, we think "the war" was something that started with Pearl Harbor in 1941 and ended with the atomic bomb in 1945. If we are British, we remember the Blitz of 1940 (and indeed are commemorating it energetically this year) and the liberation of Belsen. If we are French, we remember Vichy and the Resistance. If we are Dutch we think of Anne Frank. Even if we are German we know only a part of the story.
The NYRB Book Club
Advertisement
Snyder's ambition is to persuade the West—and the rest of the world—to see the war in a broader perspective. He does so by disputing popular assumptions about victims, death tolls, and killing methods—of which more in a moment—but above all about dates and geography. The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor. Snyder's "bloodlands," which others have called "borderlands," run from Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia (see map on page 10). This is the region that experienced not one but two—and sometimes three—wartime occupations. This is also the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical destruction.
More to the point, this is the region that experienced the worst of both Stalin's and Hitler's ideological madness. During the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, the lethal armies and vicious secret policemen of two totalitarian states marched back and forth across these territories, each time bringing about profound ethnic and political changes. In this period, the city of Lwów was occupied twice by the Red Army and once by the Wehrmacht. After the war ended it was called L'viv, not Lwów, it was no longer in eastern Poland but in western Ukraine, and its Polish and Jewish pre-war population had been murdered or deported and replaced by ethnic Ukrainians from the surrounding countryside. In this same period, the Ukrainian city of Odessa was occupied first by the Romanian army and then by the Wehrmacht before being reoccupied by the Soviet Union. Each time power changed hands there were battles and sieges, and each time an army retreated from the city it blew up the harbor or massacred Jews. Similar stories can be told about almost any place in the region.
This region was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europe—killing that began not in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but in 1933, with the famine in Ukraine. Between 1933 and 1945, fourteen million people died there, not in combat but because someone made a deliberate decision to murder them. These deaths took place in the bloodlands, and not accidentally so: "Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow," writes Snyder, "but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between."
Beginning in the 1930s, Stalin conducted his first utopian agricultural experiment in Ukraine, where he collectivized the land and conducted a "war" for grain with the kulaks, the "wealthy" peasants (whose wealth sometimes consisted of a single cow). His campaign rapidly evolved into a war against Ukrainian peasant culture itself, culminating in a mass famine in 1933. In that same year, Hitler came to power and began dreaming of creating Lebensraum, living space, for German colonists in Poland and Ukraine, a project that could only be realized by eliminating the people who lived there.2 In 1941, the Nazis also devised the Hunger Plan, a scheme to feed German soldiers and civilians by starving Polish and Soviet citizens. Once again, the Nazis decided, the produce of Ukraine's collective farms would be confiscated and redistributed: "Socialism in one country would be supplanted by socialism for the German race."
Not accidentally, the fourteen million victims of these ethnic and political schemes were mostly not Russians or Germans, but the peoples who inhabited the lands in between. Stalin and Hitler shared a contempt for the very notions of Polish, Ukrainian, and Baltic independence, and jointly strove to eliminate the elites of those countries. Following their invasion of western Poland in 1939, the Germans arrested and murdered Polish professors, priests, intellectuals, and politicians. Following their invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, the Soviet secret police arrested and murdered Polish professors, priests, intellectuals, and politicians. A few months later, Stalin ordered the murder of some 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn and in other forests nearby as well.
Stalin and Hitler also shared a hatred for the Jews who had long flourished in this region, and who were far more numerous there than in Germany or anywhere else in Western Europe. Snyder points out that Jews were fewer than one percent of the German population when Hitler came to power in 1933, and many did manage to flee. Hitler's vision of a "Jew-free" Europe could thus only be realized when the Wehrmacht invaded the bloodlands, which is where most of the Jews of Europe actually lived. Of the 5.4 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, four million were from the bloodlands. The vast majority of the rest—including the 165,000 German Jews who did not escape—were taken to the bloodlands to be murdered. After the war, Stalin became paranoid about those Soviet Jews who remained, in part because they wanted to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust. At the end of his life he purged and arrested many thousands of them, though he died too soon to carry out another mass murder.
Above all, this was the region where Nazism and Soviet communism clashed. Although they had signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in 1939, agreeing to divide the bloodlands between them, Stalin and Hitler also came to hate each other. This hatred proved fatal to both German and Soviet soldiers who had the bad luck to become prisoners of war. Both dictators treated captured enemies with deadly utilitarianism. For the Germans, Soviet POWs were expendable: they consumed calories needed by others and, unlike Western POWs, were considered to be subhuman. And so they were deliberately starved to death in hideous "camps" in Poland, Russia, and Belarus that were not camps but death zones. Penned behind barbed wire, often in open fields without food, medicine, shelter, or bedding, they died in extraordinary numbers and with great rapidity. On any given day in the autumn of 1941, as many Soviet POWs died as did British and American POWs during the entire war. In total more than three million perished, mostly within a period of a few months.
In essence the Soviet attitude toward German POWs was no different. When, following the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army suddenly found itself with 90,000 prisoners, it also put them in open fields without any food or shelter. Over the next few months, at least half a million German and Axis soldiers would die in Soviet captivity. But as the Red Army began to win the war, it tried harder to keep captives alive, the better to deploy them as forced laborers. According to Soviet statistics, 2.3 million German soldiers and about a million of their allies (from Romania, Italy, Hungary, and Austria, but also France and Holland) eventually wound up in the labor camps of the Gulag, along with some 600,000 Japanese whose fate has been almost forgotten in their native land.3
Some were released after the war and others were released in the 1950s. There wasn't necessarily any political logic to these decisions. At one point in 1947, at the height of the postwar famine, the NKVD unexpectedly released several hundred thousand war prisoners. There was no political explanation: the Soviet leadership simply hadn't enough food to keep them all alive. And in the postwar world there were pressures—most of all from the USSR's new East German client state—to keep them alive. The Nazis had operated without such constraints.
Though some of the anecdotes and statistics may be surprising to those who don't know this part of the world, scholars will find nothing in Bloodlands that is startlingly new. Historians of the region certainly know that three million Soviet soldiers starved to death in Nazi camps, that most of the Holocaust took place in the East, and that Hitler's plans for Ukraine were no different from Stalin's. Snyder's original contribution is to treat all of these episodes—the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, Stalin's mass executions, the planned starvation of Soviet POWs, postwar ethnic cleansing—as different facets of the same phenomenon. Instead of studying Nazi atrocities or Soviet atrocities separately, as many others have done, he looks at them together. Yet Snyder does not exactly compare the two systems either. His intention, rather, is to show that the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing than either might have carried out alone.
Applebaum-Map-111110.jpg
Mike King
Europe in 1933. The shaded areas are what Timothy Snyder calls the bloodlands. Anne Applebaum writes, 'Between 1933 and 1945, fourteen million people died there, not in combat but because someone made a deliberate decision to murder them.'
He also wants to show that this interaction had consequences for the inhabitants of the region. From a great distance in time and space, we in the West have the luxury of discussing the two systems in isolation, comparing and contrasting, judging and analyzing, engaging in theoretical arguments about which was worse. But people who lived under both of them, in Poland or in Ukraine, experienced them as part of a single historical moment. Snyder explains:
The Nazi and Soviet regimes were sometimes allies, as in the joint occupation of Poland [from 1939–1941]. They sometimes held compatible goals as foes: as when Stalin chose not to aid the rebels in Warsaw in 1944 [during the Warsaw uprising], thereby allowing the Germans to kill people who would later have resisted communist rule…. Often the Germans and the Soviets goaded each other into escalations that cost more lives than the policies of either state by itself would have.
In some cases, the atrocities carried out by one power eased the way for the other. When the Nazis marched into western Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic states in 1941, they entered a region from which the Soviet secret police had deported hundreds of thousands of people in the previous few months, and shot thousands of prisoners in the previous few days. The conquering Germans were thus welcomed by some as "liberators" who might save the population from a genuinely murderous regime. They were also able to mobilize popular anger at these recent atrocities, and in some places to direct some of that anger at local Jews who had, in the public imagination—and sometimes in reality—collaborated with the Soviet Union. It is no accident that the acceleration of the Holocaust occurred at precisely this moment.
To look at the history of mid-twentieth-century Europe in this way also has consequences for Westerners. Among other things, Snyder asks his readers to think again about the most famous films and photographs taken at Belsen and Buchenwald by the British and American soldiers who liberated those camps. These pictures, which show starving, emaciated people, walking skeletons in striped uniforms, stacks of corpses piled up like wood, have become the most enduring images of the Holocaust. Yet the people in these photographs were mostly not Jews: they were forced laborers who had been kept alive because the German war machine needed them to produce weapons and uniforms. Only when the German state began to collapse in early 1945 did they begin to starve to death in large numbers.
The vast majority of Hitler's victims, Jewish and otherwise, never saw a concentration camp. Although about a million people died because they were sent to do forced labor in German concentration camps, some ten million died in killing fields in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia—that means they were taken to the woods, sometimes with the assistance of their neighbors, and shot—as well as in German starvation zones and German gas chambers. These gas chambers were not "camps," Snyder argues, though they were sometimes adjacent to camps, as at Auschwitz:
Under German rule, the concentration camps and the death factories operated under different principles. A sentence to the concentration camp Belsen was one thing, a transport to the death factory Bełz·ec something else. The first meant hunger and labor, but also the likelihood of survival; the second meant immediate and certain death by asphyxiation. This, ironically, is why people remember Belsen and forget Bełz·ec.
He makes a similar point about Stalin's victims, arguing that although a million died in the Soviet Gulag between 1933 and 1945, an additional six million died from politically induced Soviet famines and in Soviet killing fields. I happen to think Snyder's numbers are a little low—the figure for Gulag deaths is certainly higher than a million—but the proportions are probably correct. In the period between 1930 and 1953, the number of people who died in labor camps—from hunger, overwork, and cold, while living in wooden barracks behind barbed wire—is far lower than the number who died violently from machine-gun fire combined with the number who starved to death because their village was deprived of food.
The image we have of the prisoner in wooden shoes, dragging himself to work every morning, losing his humanity day by day—the image also created in the brilliant writings of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn—is in this sense somewhat misleading. In fact, prisoners who could work had at least a chance of staying alive. Prisoners who were too weak to work, or for whom work could not be organized because of war and chaos, were far more likely to die. The 5.4 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust mostly died instantly, in gas chambers or mobile vans or in silent forests. We have no photographs of them, or of their corpses.
The chronological and geographical arguments presented in Bloodlands also complicate the debate over the proper use of the word "genocide." As not everybody now remembers, this word (from the Greek genos, tribe, and the French -cide) was coined in 1943 by a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, Raphael Lemkin, who had long been trying to draw the attention of the international community to what he at first called "the crime of barbarity." In 1933, inspired by news of the Armenian massacre, he had proposed that the League of Nations treat mass murder committed "out of hatred towards a racial, religious or social collectivity" as an international crime. After he fled Nazi-occupied Poland in 1940, Lemkin intensified his efforts. He persuaded the Nuremburg prosecutors to use the word "genocide" during the trials, though not in the verdict. He also got the new United Nations to draft a Convention on Genocide. Finally, after much debate, the General Assembly passed this convention in 1948.
As the Stanford historian Norman Naimark explains in Stalin's Genocides, the UN's definition of genocide was deliberately narrow: "Acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." This was because Soviet diplomats had demanded the exclusion of any reference to social, economic, and political groups. Had they left these categories in, prosecution of the USSR for the murder of aristocrats (a social group), kulaks (an economic group), or Trotskyites (a political group) would have been possible.
Although Lemkin himself continued to advocate a broader definition of the term, the idea that the word "genocide" can refer only to the mass murder of an ethnic group has stuck. In fact, until recently the term was used almost exclusively to refer to the Holocaust, the one "genocide" that is recognized as such by almost everybody: the international community, the former Allies, even the former perpetrators.
Perhaps because of that unusually universal recognition, the word has more recently acquired almost magical qualities. Nations nowadays campaign for their historical tragedies to be recognized as "genocide," and the term has become a political weapon both between and within countries. The disagreement between Armenians and Turks over whether the massacre of Armenians after World War I was "genocide" has been the subject of a resolution introduced in the US Congress. The leaders of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine campaigned to have the Ukrainian famine recognized as "genocide" in international courts (and in January 2010, a court in Kiev did convict Stalin and other high officials of "genocide" against the Ukrainian nation). But the campaign was deliberately dropped when their more pro-Russian (or post-Soviet) opponents came to power. They have since deleted a link to the genocide campaign from the presidential website.
As the story of Lemkin's genocide campaign well illustrates, this discussion of the proper use of the word has also been dogged by politics from the beginning. The reluctance of intellectuals on the left to condemn communism; the fact that Stalin was allied with Roosevelt and Churchill; the existence of German historians who tried to downplay the significance of the Holocaust by comparing it to Soviet crimes; all of that meant that, until recently, it was politically incorrect in the West to admit that we defeated one genocidal dictator with the help of another. Only now, with the publication of so much material from Soviet and Central European archives, has the extent of the Soviet Union's mass murders become better known in the West. In recent years, some in the former Soviet sphere of influence—most notably in the Baltic states and Ukraine—have begun to use the word "genocide" in legal documents to describe the Soviet Union's mass killings too.
Naimark's short book is a polemical contribution to this debate. Though he acknowledges the dubious political history of the UN convention, he goes on to argue that even under the current definition, Stalin's attack on the kulaks and on the Ukrainian peasants should count as genocide. So should Stalin's targeted campaigns against particular ethnic groups. At different times the Soviet secret police hunted down, arrested, and murdered ethnic Poles, Germans, and Koreans who happened to be living in the USSR, and of course they murdered 20,000 Polish officers within a few weeks. A number of small nations, notably the Chechens, were also arrested and deported en masse during the war: men, women, children, and grandparents were put on trains, and sent to live in Central Asia, where they were meant to die and eventually disappear as a nation. A similar fate met the Crimean Tatars.
Like Snyder's, Naimark's work has also ranged widely, from his groundbreaking book on the Soviet occupation of East Germany to studies of ethnic cleansing. As a result his argument is authoritative, clear, and hard to dispute. Yet if we take the perspective offered in Bloodlands seriously, we also have to ask whether the whole genocide debate itself—and in particular the long-standing argument over whether Stalin's murders "qualify"—is not a red herring. If Stalin's and Hitler's mass murders were different but not separate, and if neither would have happened in quite the same way without the other, then how can we talk about whether one is genocide and the other is not?
To the people who actually experienced both tyrannies, such definitions hardly mattered. Did the Polish merchant care whether he died because he was a Jew or because he was a capitalist? Did the starving Ukrainian child care whether she had been deprived of food in order to create a Communist paradise or in order to provide calories for the soldiers of the German Reich? Perhaps we need a new word, one that is broader than the current definition of genocide and means, simply, "mass murder carried out for political reasons." Or perhaps we should simply agree that the word "genocide" includes within its definition the notions of deliberate starvation as well as gas chambers and concentration camps, that it includes the mass murder of social groups as well as ethnic groups and be done with it.
applebaum_2-111110.jpg
Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos
Refugees at a transit camp, Dessau, Germany, April 1945
Finally, the arguments of Bloodlands also complicate the modern notion of memory—memory, that is, as opposed to history. It is true, for example, that the modern German state "remembers" the Holocaust—in official documents, in public debates, in monuments, in school textbooks—and is often rightly lauded for doing so. But how comprehensive is this memory? How many Germans "remember" the deaths of three million Soviet POWs? How many know or care that the secret treaty signed between Hitler and Stalin not only condemned the inhabitants of western Poland to deportation, hunger, and often death in slave labor camps, but also condemned the inhabitants of eastern Poland to deportation, hunger, and often death in Soviet exile? The Katyn massacre really is, in this sense, partially Germany's responsibility: without Germany's collusion with the Soviet Union, it would not have happened. Yet modern Germany's very real sense of guilt about the Holocaust does not often extend to Soviet soldiers or even to Poles.
If we remember the twentieth century for what it actually was, and not for what we imagine it to have been, the misuse of history for national political purposes also becomes more difficult. The modern Russian state often talks about the "twenty million Soviet dead" during World War II as a way of emphasizing its victimhood and martyrdom. But even if we accept that suspiciously large round number, it is still important to acknowledge that the majority of those were not Russians, did not live in modern Russia, and did not necessarily die because of German aggression. It is also important to acknowledge that Soviet citizens were just as likely to die during the war years because of decisions made by Stalin, or because of the interaction between Stalin and Hitler, as they were from the commands of Hitler alone.
For different reasons, the American popular memory of World War II is also due for some revision. In the past, we have sometimes described this as the "good war," at least when contrasted to the morally ambiguous wars that followed. At some level this is understandable: we did fight for human rights in Germany and Japan, we did leave democratic German and Japanese regimes in our wake, and we should be proud of having done so. But it is also true that while we were fighting for democracy and human rights in the lands of Western Europe, we ignored and then forgot what happened further east.
As a result, we liberated one half of Europe at the cost of enslaving the other half for fifty years. We really did win the war against one genocidal dictator with the help of another. There was a happy end for us, but not for everybody. This does not make us bad—there were limitations, reasons, legitimate explanations for what happened. But it does make us less exceptional. And it does make World War II less exceptional, more morally ambiguous, and thus more similar to the wars that followed.
If nothing else, a reassessment of what we know about Europe in the years between 1933 and 1953 could finally cure us of that "lack of imagination" that so appalled Czesław Miłosz almost sixty years ago. When considered in isolation, Auschwitz can be easily compartmentalized, characterized as belonging to a specific place and time, or explained away as the result of Germany's unique history or particular culture. But if Auschwitz was not the only mass atrocity, if mass murder was simultaneously taking place across a multinational landscape and with the support of many different kinds of people, then it is not so easy to compartmentalize or explain away. The more we learn about the twentieth century, the harder it will be to draw easy lessons or make simple judgments about the people who lived through it—and the easier it will be to empathize with and understand them.
Letters
'The Worst of the Madness' December 23, 2010
1.
Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (1953; Penguin, 2001), pp. 26–29. ↩
2.
Typical is the story of a house I own in northwest Poland: intending to "Germanize" the region, the Nazis evicted the Polish owners in 1939 and installed a German family from Lithuania in their place. These Germans were evicted again in 1944, and the house became state property. ↩
3.
These figures come from Richard Overy, Russia's War (Penguin, 1997), p. 297, and from Voennoplennye v SSSR, 1939–1956: dokumenty i materialy , edited by M.M. Zagorul'ko (Moscow: Logos, 2000), pp. 331–333. ↩
Also In This Issue
A Genius for Contempt
Russell Baker e-edition
A Hero of Our Time
Jonathan Mirsky
'A Tremendous Painter'
Sanford Schwartz e-edition
The Real Danger to the Economy
George Soros
Subscribe to the NY Review!
NYRblog
Lilia M. Schwarcz
Rio's New Reality Show
Orhan Pamuk
The Fading Dream of Europe
Michael Tomasky
Obama's Second Act?
Timothy Snyder
Brutality in Belarus
Ian Johnson
Finding the Facts About Mao's Victims
Newsletter Sign Up
News of upcoming issues, contributors, special events, online features, more.
The NYRB Book Club
Advertisement
* Home
* Contact Us
* About
* Subscribe
* Advertise
* University Press Listing
* Independent Press Listing
* Help/FAQ
* Books
* Terms of Use
* Feeds
* Newsletters
Copyright © 1963-2011 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.
"
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/worst-madness/?pagination=false&printpage=true
http://snipurl.com/1rcdeh
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)