Somehow, if the Catalan artist Joan Miro′ (1893-1983) paints a person as a giant foot kicking a ball to a bird, the image makes sense. Miro′ visited the United States numerous times, sometimes for months, during his long and productive career. Near the end of his life Miro′ said, “It was American painting that inspired me.”

Miro′ and the United States, a special exhibition that runs through July 5, 2026 at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., explores Miro′s connections with American artists such as Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and Lee Krasner and how those connections influenced 20^th century art in the United States and Europe.

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive and well-illustrated catalog in the form of a series of essays about Miro′, his travels and exhibitions in the United States, and his interactions with American artists. All page references in this post are to the catalog.

The 75 works from more than 30 artists on display at the Phillips Collections show that 20^th century cultural and artistic influences did not travel exclusively from Europe to this country. In a 1947 interview, Miro′ spoke of the “energy and vitality…enthusiasm and freshness” of American painting. (67)

More about the exhibition can be seen

here.

The exhibition begins on the Phillips Collection’s third floor with a downsized version of a large mural that Miro′ painted for Cincinnati’s Terrace Plaza Hotel.

The hotel’s architects, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, were committed to midcentury modern design and wanted to incorporate modern art in their buildings. Miro′ was commissioned to create a mural for the hotel’s restaurant. The Cincinnati mural, about eight feet by 30 feet on a curved surface, was the occasion for Miro′s 1947 trip to the United States. This was his first visit and it lasted about eight months. During that time he met and interacted with numerous American artists, particularly Alexander Calder.

The exhibition also includes a study for a section of the Cincinnati mural:

Why Miro′ Fascinates

Miro′ may be one of the abstract artists whose work provides the best answer to the, “My-five-year-old-son-or-daughter-could-do-that” school of modern art criticism. Miro′s forms are deceptively simple. The intricate composition, or arrangement, of those forms, many of which reappear in his paintings, shows a sophisticated and imaginative aesthetic. Miro′s forms are not scattershot choices; they relate to each other.

Miro′s paintings are also notable for their singularity. His paintings are instantly recognizable as his work. The figures with recognizable facial features—Miro′ called them “personages”—are fun to look for in his paintings and there are just enough of them.

The Constellations

Imaginative complexity that draws us in to look further is a sign of artistic mastery. In 1945, Miro′ had a widely-acknowledged artistic triumph in an exhibition of a series of small oil and gouache (a type of opaque watercolor) paintings that he called the Constellations. Critic Andre′ Breton called the Constellations, “the first message of an artistic kind to reach America from Europe since the onset of the war.” (161)

Lithographs of the Constellations were very popular. They were collected by other artists such as Hans Hoffman, Mary Callery and Robert Motherwell. Artist George Mercer wrote to Lee Krasner about the Constellations, “You refer to the Miro′ show and to the paintings—‘each painting is a little miracle.’ That is a wonderful description. I have stored it and remembered it. I shan’t forget it.” (162)

The Phillips Collection show has several examples of the Constellations, but two stand out:

Here, a solid background contrasts with the intricate and connected forms like constellations against the blackness of a night sky. Miroﹶ is working with a reduced palette that makes the sparingly-used colors stand out. Any of three bird-like forms (in yellow, white and blue) could be the beautiful bird. Are the back-to-back cloaked seated figures at the lower left the pair of lovers described in the title of the painting? They appear to be reluctant listeners. Maybe the lovers (and we) will never completely understand what the beautiful bird reveals about the unknown.

The Poetess is not as detailed as some of the other paintings in the Constellations series, but the more we look, the more there is to see. Here, Miro′ adds color, a more varied background, and uses fewer connections between the forms. The Poetess is described in some accounts as a work of Surrealism. That may be a fair description, but the essence of the work is in its intricate fun. Is that the poetess with her arms outstretched in the lower left of the painting? She seems to be conducting or organizing the figures beside and above her.

Miro,′ the Spanish Civil War, and Arshile Gorky

Miro′ could break the rules of painting because he knew the rules—he had mastered representational painting. Like other artists in Europe, he was affected by the wars in the 1930’s and 1940’s. In 1937, Miro′ fled Spain for Paris because of the Spanish Civil War. While in Paris, he painted Still Life With an Old Shoe, which is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The painting is often compared to Picasso’s Guernica because of the nightmarish colors and the gloomy clouds which seem to foretell coming dark events.

In 1943 or 1944 American artist Arshile Gorky borrowed Miro′s composition in this painting, Garden in Sochi, one of a series of paintings with the same title. This version is displayed next to Miro′s Still Life With an Old Shoe at the Phillips Collection. Seeing the two works side-by-side is a remarkable experience.

Gorky’s painting recalls his childhood in Armenia. The Hauser & Wirth gallery sees the connection between the paintings by Miró and Gorky this way:

The prevailing motif of the ‘Garden in Sochi’ series is that of a large boot-like form, visible here in red along the lower edge of the composition. Thought to represent his mother’s old-fashioned butter-churn or a Turkish slipper, it is also understood as a direct reference to Miró’s ‘Still Life with Old Shoe’ (1937). Consisting of four symbolic objects: an apple with protruding fork, a shoe, a gin bottle and a broken loaf of bread, Miró’s painting is considered as a response to Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) and an allegorical expression of protest against the atrocities of war.

The Red Sun

This brief appreciation of the Miro′ and the United States show concludes with one of the Phillips Collection’s many treasures, Miro′s The Red Sun (1948).

The figure in the blue background is encircled by another red spot to which a few more brush-strokes have been added to make a cheerful little face. Another nattily-dressed figure in the lower right-hand corner of the painting seems to admire the combinations of shapes and colors.

Large and crowded blockbuster exhibitions at behemoth museums—the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in Washington—may be the way of our time. The fascinating Miro′ and the United States show at the accessible and manageable Phillips Collection is a welcome contrast.

Your comments are very welcome.

NB: If you do not play this video you will miss something great!

Today, February 19, is the 85th birthday of William “Smokey” Robinson, Jr., the founder and lead singer of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Robinson was an essential songwriter and singer for Motown Records. Berry Gordy, Motown’s founder, was not an easygoing man but he was a keen judge of talent. Gordy signed the Miracles as one of Motown’s first acts. Gordy gave Robinson unusual freedom and respect compared to the way he treated other Motown artists.

Robinson and the Miracles had a string of hits for Motown including, “Tears of a Clown,” “Going to a Go-Go,” “More Love,” “The Tracks of My Tears,” and “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage.”

Robinson also wrote hit songs for numerous other Motown artists. This post from February 2022 describes how Robinson wrote and produced “My Girl,” an iconic Motown hit, for The Temptations and the group’s lead singer, David Ruffin.

Robinson has enjoyed a successful solo career for decades. He is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the National Medal for the Arts.

Thanks for everything, Smokey, and Happy Birthday!

Motown bass guitarist James Jamerson’s three repeated bass notes opening “My Girl” by the Temptations are one of the most familiar song introductions in popular music.  The Temptations came together from two Detroit groups: the Primes, with Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams and the Distants with Melvin Franklin and Otis Williams.  Motown founder and mastermind Berry Gordy changed the name of the Primes to the Temptations.  “My Girl’s” lead singer, David Ruffin, was the last to join the group in 1961. He became a Temptation partly at the insistence of his brother, Jimmy, also a singer.

Jimmy Ruffin said:

David didn’t want to join that group and they didn’t want him in the group. I was like David’s manager by proxy, him being the younger brother.  I suggested that they should have David join the group, because I had been trying to get David signed with Motown and they didn’t want to sign him.1 

“My Girl” was one of a string of hit records for the the Temptations. The group, with 35 Top 40 hits in 11 years beginning in 1964, had more hits than any other Motown group, except the Supremes.

The Temptations persuaded Motown legend Smokey Robinson and his fellow Miracle and writing partner, Ronnie White, to let them record “My Girl” instead of Robinson and White’s group, the Miracles.  Robinson, who knew or at least suspected that the song would be a hit, made a shrewd artistic decision: for “My Girl” he elevated his role as a songwriter over his role as a member of the Miracles. Ruffin’s powerful and urgent voice would balance the song’s sweetness—“a sweeter song than the birds in the trees”—in the words of Robinson’s lyrics.

The song was recorded over two months in the fall of 1964 and released on December 21, 1964.  Gordy, ever the capitalist, gave Motown songwriters a $1,000 bonus for Number One songs.  Robinson and White collected their bonus: “My Girl” reached the top of the R&B and Pop charts in early 1965.

David Ruffin, born in 1941 in Whynot, Mississippi, became a compelling singer and a mesmerizing dancer.  Kendricks, Franklin and Paul Williams had been the lead singers on earlier Temptations songs, but Robinson saw something special in Ruffin. He said:

But I knew David was in there, man. He was like a sleeping giant. So, if I could get a hit on him, man, they would be multi-faceted.  I had also used Paul Williams’ voice on a few things.  In fact, the first record I ever recorded on them was a thing called “I Want a Love I Can See,” and I used Paul Williams’ voice. But “My Girl” was written specifically with David Ruffin in mind.2

The video shows the Temptations working on “My Girl” in Studio A, the basement of Hitsville U.S.A., the round-the-clock recording studio that Gordy established in a rowhouse on Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard.  Hitsville is now the center of the fascinating Motown Museum. 

More information about the museum is available:

here.

The video shows the cherub-faced Robinson in headphones and a turtleneck conducting in the background and some of Motown’s accomplished session musicians, the Funk Brothers, including legendary bassist Jamerson and drummer Benny Benjamin.  A 2002 documentary, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, describes the Funk Brothers and their essential, but not widely appreciated, contributions to Motown. Information on the movie is available:

here.

Motown provided session work to a wide variety of musicians.  The video also shows a nattily-attired string section that could be musicians from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and a full horn section.

The latter part of the video shows the Temptations performing before a live audience and contains scenes of their remarkable choreography.  The group practiced for two hours a day or more under the direction of dancer and choreographer Cholly Atkins of Motown’s Artist Development Department.  Their signature move, the Temptations Walk, and their glides, dips, spins and hand movements, emphasized the story line of each song with precise coordination. The Temptations in performance were an aural and a visual experience.

“My Girl” is great art. The song seems inevitable and obvious and it is neither. Surely, almost anyone could write a song in a “My Girl’s” stately waltz tempo about a lover whose beloved provides, “sunshine on a cloudy day.” It took Robinson and White to do it. Their artistry, and that of Ruffin and the others at Motown who made “My Girl,” conceals itself—a sign of high artistic achievement. There is a controversy over whether Bob Dylan actually called Robinson, “America’s greatest living poet,” but the idea is worth thinking about.

Here is critic Dave Marsh on Motown’s remarkable ability to combine diverse talents to generate musical masterpieces like “My Girl”:

Once you begin to delve into the depths of the Motown story, what impresses you most is the delicious particularity of each of those records.  If Motown is as much the story of Jamerson’s bass lines and Eddie Holland’s lyrics as it is of Diana Ross’s vocals and Smokey Robinson’s songs, it is more than anything the product of the moments when several of those distinguished components came together.  Just listen to the opening seconds of the Temptations’ “My Girl” in which the archetypal Jamerson bass line sets up the perfection of Robinson’s rhymes within the rasping ache of David Ruffin’s voice.  Which is not to slight gorgeous harmonies the rest of the Tempts provide, or Benjamin’s driving drum rolls, or some of the sharpest finger pops in the history of recorded sound.  By the time Ruffin gets ‘round to declaring, “I’ve got all the riches, baby, one man can claim,” the listener feels as wealthy as Ruffin.”3

Yes, that’s it.

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College Town Life

Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I was born and grew up, is a big small town. Interesting things can happen there, many of which involve the University of Michigan which employed my father. Even so, I seemed to see the same people in the same places doing the same things over and over. And, in the 1950’s and 1960’s the town lacked diversity. Ann Arbor, which called itself the “Research Center of the Midwest” when I lived there, could also seem self-satisfied.

Of course, Ann Arbor had its positive features for townies like me. I snuck into movies sponsored by campus organizations, into the university’s gyms to play basketball, and I worked for the Michigan tennis coach.

And, Ann Arbor’s numerous bookstores and newsstands made it easy to get specialty or out-of-town publications. What I read confirmed my suspicions that there were more interesting things going on elsewhere, particularly in New York. I even read Punch to see if I could understand British humor, but I was only partially successful.

I often read The Village Voice which seemed thoroughly sophisticated and “downtown” in a very New York sense. The Voice reported on a different world—even its classified advertisements and personals told interesting stories that were different from life in Ann Arbor.

Jules Feiffer’s cartoons were the coolest part of the very cool Voice, and I read them avidly as I tried to understand the politics and neuroses of the New Yorkers he drew. Feiffer seemed to say so much with a few lines and a little shading.

Feiffer, who excelled at cartooning, plays and screenplays, and fiction in various forms, died at 95 on January 17. The New York Times published a lengthy and admiring obituary describing his remarkably productive, and much honored, artistic life. The obituary can be seen

here.

Numerous tributes capture the astonishing range of Feiffer’s literary and artistic accomplishments. This post will not recover that ground. Even so, the scope of his talent was amazing. Who else could have written the screen play for Carnal Knowledge (1971), which reimagined the battle of the sexes as a kind of thermonuclear war, and illustrated the beloved children’s book, The Phantom Tollbooth?

Going East

I was determined to leave Ann Arbor for college even though I knew the University of Michigan was a fine institution. I have met several UM alumni who, learning that I grew up in Ann Arbor, said, “The best four years of my life were in Ann Arbor!” However, like Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I wanted to go east.

My plan (if “plan” means anything at age 19) was to go east to college and return to attend the University of Michigan Law School where the tuition for members of staff families was $600 per semester.

Plans can change. Through an accident of fate I ended up at Columbia Law School. A collateral benefit to that development was that I could indulge my curiosity about New York City. My timing was not ideal. In the early 1970’s New York was at an absolute low point: the city was plagued by violent crime, including the Son of Sam killings, grime, graffiti and trash everywhere, gypsy cabs, drug-driven devastation in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and a financial collapse.

New York, New York

Living on on the Upper West Side at 114th Street and Riverside Drive near Columbia was endlessly interesting and sometimes disturbing—a law school professor was stabbed to death in a street robbery near the law school on the first or second day of classes in my first year.

By 1974-1975, my third year, I had essentially figured out law school. I started dating the sparkling Carolyn Kammerer who worked as an assistant cartoon editor at Playboy Magazine. Her boss, Michelle Urry, the cartoon editor, regularly met with Playboy’s founder, Hugh Hefner, to review potential cartoons. Hefner began his magazine career as a cartoonist and he paid a lot of attention to Playboy’s cartoons.

The New Yorker and Playboy paid the most for cartoons in that era. Many top cartoonists appeared in both magazines, but saved their racier material for Playboy. I learned from Carolyn that cartoonists do not offer anything like what appears in newspapers and magazines. A typical submission from a cartoonist might be stick figures on a piece of scrap paper or napkin with a scrawled caption. A finished cartoon is created only after the work is sold to a publisher. At work, Carolyn went through these submissions which she called, “the slush.”

One day, Carolyn invited me to a party later that month that Michelle was giving in her loft in Chelsea. I said yes, of course, but that I had no idea what a loft was and only a vague notion of how to get to Chelsea. I knew Chelsea was downtown, and not just geographically.

On the night of the party, we entered the loft which was dazzling. Formerly a factory, it was a soaring interior space of brick and steel girders. The loft was spectacularly designed and appointed and contained significant paintings and sculptures. The large and supremely hip crowd contained people who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of a combination of the Voice and Vogue. They were enjoying lavish food and drinks.

I somehow got in an extended conversation with a tall man with a receding hairline. We talked for quite a while before either of us asked the other what he did. I learned years later that what-do-you-do-for-a-living usually comes up in the first two minutes of any conversation involving newly introduced people in Washington.

Eventually, the tall man asked me what I did. I said that I was a third-year law student at Columbia. He asked me a few questions about law school or lawyers. When I asked him what he did, he said, “Oh, I’m Jules Feiffer.”

Somehow, that was perfect. His accurate and concise reply was not egotistical. It would have been incomplete or inaccurate if Feiffer had identified himself as a cartoonist, an illustrator, a novelist, a playwright, or a screenwriter. He was all of those and more at the highest levels of achievement.

A little later Feiffer said to me, “Let’s go over and talk with my friend, Nora Ephron.” So, we did.

To Jules Feiffer, a man of extraordinary talent and accomplishments who was gracious to a naïve law student at a party: Thank you for everything!

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The book traces four myths that Slotkin calls, “the most crucial to Americans’ under-standing of what their nation is, where it came from and what it stands for.” (12) ^[These are the Myth of the Frontier, the Myth of the Founding, three different Myths of the Civil War, and the Myth of the Good War.  The March 4, 2024 review of the book in The New York Times can be seen

here.

Slotkin, an expert on the impacts of literature and popular culture on American politics and character, is best known for trilogy of books on how myth, particularly the Myth of the Frontier, affected America’s development as a nation.  Two books in the trilogy, Regeneration Through Violence; The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 and Gunfighter Nation, were finalists for the National Book Award.  Slotkin has also written several novels including Abe, which imagines a young Abraham Lincoln, and The Crater, a novel about the explosion of a huge mine under the Confederate trenches in 1864 at Petersburg, Virginia.

I was very fortunate to take classes with Slotkin at Wesleyan in the early 1970’s. I was a naïve and callow college student.  He was then in the early stages of a brilliant career at Wesleyan.  In class, he was mesmerizing and challenging.  He taught at Wesleyan from 1966 to 2009, ultimately retiring as the Olin Professor of English and American Studies, Emeritus.

I inherited an interest in American Studies—the examination and analyses of American history, literature, art and popular culture. My father returned from combat duty in the Italian campaign in World War II with the Army’s Tenth Mountain Division to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1951 in what was then known as American Civilization. He was a historian on the faculty of the University of Michigan for 38 years.

A Great Disorder describes the historical origins of each essential American myth so that we may “fully understand the charge that each myth carries.” (12)  The origins and uses of America’s foundational myths relate directly to how these myths are used in today’s fractious politics.

Slotkin has an exceptional command of American history and culture. The book is clear and insightful on everything from James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales to the Lincoln-Douglas debates to Hollywood’s platoon movies.  An astute friend recently described A Great Disorder to me as, “The book I would recommend if someone wanted one book that explained the Red/Blue divide in American culture and politics.”

A Great Disorder, at 417 pages with extensive notes, presents comprehensive analyses of American narratives and how those narratives become myths and how those myths have been used in our culture and politics.

For example, Slotkin traces the origin of the Lost Cause myth to an 1866 book, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates by a Richmond editor, Edward Pollard.  Slotkin says:

Pollard held that the South had been entirely within its rights in seceding, and that slavery had been a benevolent and productive institution. He blamed defeat on the North’s material advantages, its ruthless destruction of Southern property—and mismanagement by the Davis administration and certain Southern generals.  Implicit in that last idea is a might-have-been: if the war had been better managed, the Confederacy might have won. (90)

Slotkin describes how useful the Myth of the Lost Cause has been to Donald Trump, who he describes as “the last President of the Confederacy” in part because of, “…his decision to become the chief defender of Confederate symbolism.” (354)  Slotkin argues:

   Trump thus made the content and meaning of America’s national myths an explicit campaign issue, and a centerpiece of his program for restoring American greatness.  He would follow the Lost Cause paradigm, emphasizing the need for extreme and violent means to redeem an imperiled civilization, and he chose this over the themes of economic prosperity and “toughness” on international trade that advisers like Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore wanted to make the basis of the campaign. (355)

MAGA, then, is a Lost Cause-derived myth of longing for what was and what might have been. And, like the Myth of the Lost Cause, MAGA readily embraces violence to redeem the culture and ideals that were supposedly lost by “real” Americans to alien populations.

Every page of A Great Disorder is informative, but the most compelling and immediate section of the book is the extended Conclusion titled National Myth and the Crisis of Democracy.  The Conclusion is really an essay on how to deal with MAGA’s political and cultural appeals that are embedded, “…in a narrative that connects its adherents to the major American national myths and gives them the exhilarating sense of riding a wave of historical destiny.” (397) 

Slotkin’s view is that myth turns history into symbols for actual use and he describes the challenge to those outside MAGA this way:

  Thus the task facing the blue coalition is not just to enact policies but to combine political action with cultural reframing to convince a skeptical public that the federal government can be a force for meaningful change.  Since the 1970s the Left and center Left have failed to formulate a coherent version of the American future, or a version of national myth that would root their program in historical tradition. (399)

Slotkin asserts that if Trump wins a second turn, “the damage to republican institutions and the national interest might well be irreparable.” (415)  He calls for vastly expanded grassroots organizing focusing on “issues that go to the heart of reform” such as racial justice, voting rights, gun safety, workers’ rights, the preservation of democracy, women’s rights and climate change. These efforts, Slotkin says, “will have to be made to meet people where they are and reopen lines of communication within and between communities” in, for example, town and city meetings and proceedings.

He observes:

      MAGA’s problem is that it can rule, but it cannot govern: it can use the instruments of law and government, the dictates of a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, and vigilante intimidation to impose a degree of obedience. But its theory of politics precludes the possibility of working with the opposition toward mutually acceptable policies.  Thus it cannot create a stable political order, such as the New Deal and neoliberal orders were in their time. (415)

This essential, and easy to miss, insight derives from facts that are right before us: every MAGA-sponsored government initiative or proposal is either subtractive (reproductive rights) or a mandate (mass deportation, border walls, tariffs). The essence of MAGA is, as Slotkin argues, a great disorder.

 A Great Disorder is not light reading, but its rewards are abundant.

 Your comments are very welcome.

[1] All page citations are to A Great Disorder.

Special thanks to Allen Yale for assistance with this post.

An easy one block walk from the north entrance to the Dupont Circle Metro Station, the Phillips Collection, 1600 21^st Street, N.W., Washington, D.C., is an overlooked cultural treasure.  In 1926, art collector and founder Duncan Phillips (1886-1966), described the collection in his townhouse as, “an intimate museum combined with an experiment station.”

Other art museums are grander, but the Phillips Collection is an unmatched combination of manageability, great art, and fun. With due respect to museum acquisition committees, there is something special about a small museum, like the Phillips Collection, that reflects the tastes and passions of its founder.  You can find out more about the Phillips Collection

here.

Duncan Phillips knew and admired the French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) and avidly collected his work.  A special exhibition, Bonnard’s Worlds, is at the Phillips Collection until June 2, and it is an exceptional experience. The Bonnard show was organized by the Phillips Collection and the Kimbell Museum of Fort Worth, Texas and those two museums will be the only places it can be seen. 

There are also many exceptional works in the remainder of the museum and many of these were directly acquired by Duncan Phillips during his long career as a collector.

What follows are reasons to visit the Phillips Collection right away (or at least before June 2) and a suggestion or two about seeing the permanent collection.

 Bonnard’s Worlds: Why It Is Worth Visiting the Phillips Soon

Bonnard’s Worlds is organized by gathering Bonnard’s paintings of topics he returned to repeatedly, for example, gardens, street views and domestic scenes. We see how Bonnard treated similar scenes and subjects at different points in his career.

Bonnard’s paintings seem to be those of an ultra-caffeinated Impressionist.  He detonated colors, particularly yellow, on his canvases.  The signature painting for the Bonnard’s World show is The Open Window. Bonnard painted this painting in 1921 and Duncan Phillips acquired it in 1930.

The Open Window combines color, perspective, nature and domesticity.  Our eyes move between the colorful interior and the blue expanse of the exterior sky. Bonnard’s companion and a black cat occupy the lower right corner of the painting.

The Washington Post’s underappreciated art critic, Sebastian Smee, published a thoughtful review of Bonnard’s Worlds on March 27.  You can read it

here.

Why It Is Worth Visiting the Phillips Collection Anytime

My mother retired as a high school librarian and dedicated herself to serving as a docent at the Detroit Institute of Arts.  She spent innumerable hours learning about the DIA’s permanent collection and preparing tours for special exhibitions.  Her DIA tours ranged from groups assembled on the spot to students on field trips to ethnic clubs or social groups of almost every kind. 

When we were about to visit the DIA, or another museum, she would say, “I’m going to ask you at lunch (or dinner) to assume that, with legal and financial considerations magically solved, which three works we saw today you would like delivered to you this evening.”          

This fabulous question concentrated our attention and made for great post-museum conversation.  Mom’s question was more nuanced than it seemed: some artworks, for example the massive sculptures of Alexander Calder or Richard Serra, or a huge work such as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, are intended for, and must be displayed in, public places.  In other words, great art may not necessarily be art you can live with.

So, in Mom’s memory, here are two more paintings from the Phillips Collection that, along with The Open Window, can be delivered to my house anytime.

Entrance to the Public Gardens at Arles by Vincent Van Gogh

Many visitors go to the Phillips Collection to see Pierre Auguste Renoir’s masterpiece, The Luncheon of the Boating Party, which is given pride of place on the museum’s second floor—it is visible from a number of angles. You can read more about that painting in a January 2022 About Alexandria post archived under The Best of What’s Around.

Visitors to the Phillips Collection often cluster around The Luncheon of the Boating Party and deservedly so.  However, in a room a few steps away you can spend as much time as you like with several spectacular paintings by Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890).  Here is Van Gogh’s Entrance to the Public Gardens at Arles which he painted in 1888:

Duncan Phillips acquired this painting in 1930.  It shows Van Gogh’s heavy brush work, layering of paint, and use of color in ways that make his paintings unmistakable, even from a distance.  

Here is how Duncan Phillips saw Entrance to the Public Gardens at Arles as described in the museum’s helpful website:

It is an outcry of the soul, that canvas, a shout of triumph, of joy in the sun, of thanks to God, for a brush and some good pigments wherewith to surpass the light of life itself in intensity. How to catch that pulse in nature, the repetition of certain shapes, the wave-like ripples of the heat, the saturated glare of the soil along the garden walk, the pungent, aromatic fragrance, the scintillant, opulent colors, blues and greens, yellows and oranges in full cry under the sun, the trees of many shapes and textures at the depths at which one could plunge and find shelter in the inner recesses of dark, cool shadow.

Portrait of Miss Amelia Van Buren by Thomas Eakins

Turn a corner in the east parlor of the original Phillips house and you face Thomas Eakins’ (1844-1916) portrait of Miss Amelia Van Buren, his friend and student. Eakins painted many formal portraits of Philadelphia’s elite, but this 1891 portrait is striking in what it reveals about Miss Van Buren.  Duncan Phillips acquired this painting in 1927.

Unlike the common portrait pose where the subject looks directly at us, Ms. Van Buren looks to her right and props up her head with her left hand and looks to the light entering the painting from the left.  Is she preoccupied or just bored at the prospect of sitting for her portrait or is she just thinking?  She holds a fan in her left hand and her hair, which may be going grey, is severely pulled back in the least fussy style possible. Miss Van Buren is all business.  Eakins depicts the folds and shadows of her expensive clothes with surpassing skill. 

The delights of the Bonnard show, and the treasures of permanent collection such as Entrance to the Public Gardens at Arles and Portrait of Miss Amelia Van Buren, make it worth visiting the Phillips Collection very soon.

here.

Alexandria’s colonial-era history is commemorated in historic buildings, plaques and markers, and museums. In a city where nearly a third of the residents move every five years the history of more recent times can be overlooked. In Washington’s Shadow: Race, Class, and Neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia, 1950-1970, Northwestern University graduate Griffin Harris’ deeply researched and very readable senior thesis provides a compelling portrait of Alexandria in a turbulent time.

Harris, an Alexandria native and graduate of the former T.C. Williams High School, won the Northwestern History Department’s 2023 prize for his thesis about Alexandria’s long struggle with the changes compelled by the Civil Rights movement and Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case outlawing public school segregation. The thesis can be read

here.

Harris focuses on, “…the collision of racial attitudes between the town’s diverse political factions, focusing chiefly on the issues of school desegregation and urban renewal.” (ii)[1]  He asserts that Alexandria, which did not experience rioting and violence as intense as, for example, Newark or Detroit, was one of the cities that “defined the center” without a city-wide consensus about integration:

By following the factional disputes that animated Alexandria, this thesis shows the vulnerability and fragility of suburban racial moderation, demonstrating that postwar suburban politics was more complicated and more contested than the existing literature suggests. (7)

In Washington’s Shadow explains, “[W]hen desegregation did finally happen, it represented not just a transition in [Alexandria’s] politics, but in its very identity—from southern port town to middle-class suburbia.” (13)

A Diverse Cast of Characters

The best historical accounts bring alive those people who made history happen and In Washington’s Shadow passes this test easily. On the segregationist side, Harris describes the almost total control over Virginia politics exercised by the Byrd machine headed by Governor, and later Senator, Harry F. Byrd, Jr.  The machine’s operatives included Byrd’s cousin, segregationist Alexandria Mayor Marshall Beverly, and Byrd’s brother-in-law James Thomson, a General Assembly power for many years.

The thesis describes the efforts and trials of Black Alexandrians such as Otto and Samuel Tucker, Ferdinand Day, Marion Johnson and Melvin Miller who collectively had to decide when, how, and how hard to confront the Alexandria establishment they were gradually joining.

In the public schools, segregationist high school Principal T.C. Williams was part of a culture that ultimately gave way to the “triumph of racial moderatism” (77) represented by Superintendent John C. Albohm. In Harris’ telling, Albohm “practiced a skillful form of retail politics as a regular presence at meetings of PTAs and civic groups, in living rooms and church basements.” (75)

Harris points out that Alexandria’s divisions were revealed in the 1963 election when the voters sent two veteran politicians to the House of Delegates.  One was the arch-segregationist Thomson; the other was Marion Galland who had been the president of the League of Women Voters for most of the 1950s and, “a leader of the white moderates’ opposition to massive resistance.” Galland’s platform included increasing public school spending and abolishing poll taxes. (77)

The End of Mudtown

Harris describes the complicated issues that resulted in the razing of the historically Black Seminary neighborhood in the city’s center. The neighborhood’s name related to the number of residents who worked at the nearby Episcopal seminary. As one of the last areas in the city to have paved streets, the area was derogatorily known as Mudtown.

Some called the redevelopment of the approximately 30 acres in the city’s center into Chinquapin Park, and the site for the city’s new high school, urban renewal. Others termed it “Negro removal.” The process was enormously difficult.  Miller and Johnson were involved negotiations beginning in late 1960 that culminated in the approval of the Mudtown Urban Renewal Project in February 1963. (72)

The compromise resulted in the construction of T.C. Williams High School, later renamed Alexandria City High School.  Seven acres were reserved for the construction of new houses for families who had owned property in the Seminary neighborhood.

Armistead Boothe’s Delicate Balancing Act

Nobody walked a finer line than lawyer Armistead Boothe who was first elected in 1948 as a delegate to the General Assembly.  Boothe, a native Alexandrian, saw that days of segregated schools were limited. Harris says:

Boothe’s approach to school segregation reflected neither the principled demands for racial equality endorsed by a minority of Virginians—Black Virginians, of course, but also a handful of white liberals—nor the strident racism espoused by the vast majority.  Instead, he offered ardent pragmatism, vigorously trying to define and defend a fragile position at the center of the political spectrum. (22)

In 1954, Thomson was elected to Boothe’s seat in the House of Delegates when Boothe was elected as a state senator. Segregation advocates organized a state-wide referendum that year to repeal mandatory school attendance and amend the constitution to facilitate public grants for families who wished to send their children to private segregated schools. Thomson told his supporters, “When you go to the polls vote for segregation.” Harris observes, “It was a testament to the ideological crosscurrents pulling on Alexandria that the same voters, in the same year, elected men with such divergent views.” (28)

Armistead Boothe Park is in the Cameron Station neighborhood.  The city’s website says:

On June 13, 2000, the Alexandria City Council approved the naming of the west end park at the former U.S. Army base at Cameron Station in honor of the late Armistead L. Boothe.  A native Alexandrian, Boothe served as a special assistant in the United States Office of the Attorney General from 1934 to 1936 and as City Attorney of Alexandria from 1938 to 1943.  He was a strong supporter of public school integration in the 1950s.

Boothe lost his last electoral run, a 1966 primary campaign against Harry Byrd, Jr. His 1959 campaign materials included a brochure in the form of a newspaper, The Alexandria Advocate, with articles about Boothe’s achievements, his platform, and poetry.

Here it is:

The lead article, titled “Boothe Stands Firm for Public Schools,” begins:

State Senator Army Boothe says his campaign for re-election centers on one key issue—“whether we shall have public schools for all who want them or private schools for those who can afford them.”

“I stand or fall for public education with maximum segregation,” the Senator said. “My opponent, however, prefers private schools to any integration.”

The Alexandria Advocate says, “…the truth, the whole truth and the brief truth about Army Boothe’s position on public schools, is as follows:”

1956-1958—Army voted for all bills and resolutions including interposition to preserve segregation in the public schools except bills closing public schools and cutting off state funds to the localities.

***

1959—Army supported fully the report of the Perrow Commission and the program of Governor Almond…In the Senate where the vote was 20 to 19 on the key issues involved, his vote was the single determining vote in putting through the Governor’s program and in killing the attempt of the resistors “to get the State out of the public school business.” 

The Alexandria Advocate summarizes Boothe’s public education position this way:

Under the present state plan, for which Army voted:

1.      The state public school system is maintained.

2.      The public schools of Virginia will remain at least 99% segregated for an indefinite time.

3.      No locality will be compelled to operate public schools against its will.

4.      No parent will be compelled to send his child to an integrated school against his will.

Was Boothe a “strong supporter of public school integration” as described in the city’s description of the park named for him? The views on race and integration that dominated Boothe’s time in public life were intensely held. That Boothe is seen by some today as a moderate pragmatist is a reminder of the intensity of racism’s entrenchment.

It is easy to forget that the centerpiece of massive resistance—the idea making it “massive”—was the indefinite closing of Virginia’s public schools.  Boothe stood against that. Even so, he supported integration, five years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, only to the minimum extent possible. It took court rulings to make more than token integration a fact of Alexandria life.

Harris illuminates these and other fascinating events and paradoxes in a thesis that is essential reading for anyone interested in the city’s history.

                                Special thanks to Cindy Anderson for help with this post.

[1] All page citations are to In Washington’s Shadow: Race, Class and Neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia, 1950-1970.

Why Antietam Matters

The battle of Antietam was fought on September 17, 1862.  The battle’s strategic importance in the Civil War, its importance as a societal and political event, particularly with respect to the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation five days later, and the magnitude of the Union and Confederate sacrifice there, are compelling reasons to explore Antietam.

A rebuilt Visitor Center at Antietam is scheduled to open early next year.  You can find out more about Antietam National Battlefield

here.

It is also, paradoxically, a beautiful and natural place, that is not overly developed and commercialized, with great hiking trails.

A Local Expert Talks About Antietam

Alexandria’s Mark Fitzsimmons volunteers as a Battlefield Ambassador at Antietam.

Fitzsimmons explains why the future of the country was on the line at the battle there:

More Americans died there (including a large number born elsewhere) than in any other single day of conflict in US history (including D Day and 9/11).  Many prominent historians (Bruce Catton and James MacPherson to name two of the better known) believe it was the real turning point of the war, not Gettysburg.  The Confederacy had been on a winning run in the East since Robert E. Lee took over its main army.  He invaded Maryland to pull Union forces out of their defenses at Washington and to produce a knockout victory on Union soil.  Northern morale in the Army and across the population was very low, elections were forthcoming, England and France were considering intervening to push a resolution that included recognition, and there was a chance that Rebel troops in Maryland could push that state into the Confederacy. Lee believed beating the Yankees north of their border could lead to a negotiated settlement that recognized Southern independence.

 An astonishing 23,000 men were killed, wounded or missing, including 6 generals, 3 on each side, killed in the single day of fighting.  They are memorialized at an Annual Memorial Illumination.  This year’s ceremony takes place on December 3. 

More information about the Annual Memorial Illumination is available

here.

Fitzsimmons sums up the importance of the battle this way:

The Union stopped Lee at Antietam.  While it was not the complete victory that Lincoln hoped for (they did come close, several times over the course of the battle) the Confederates did retreat back into Virginia.  The Southern momentum of the first half of the year was gone.  Lincoln’s Republican party prevailed in the midterm elections and maintained a majority in Congress that supported his policies. The Europeans held back.  And, of arguably more significance, the victory gave Lincoln the political capital he needed to announce the Emancipation Proclamation. That ended any chance that remained for some kind of negotiated settlement, and started the road to the end of slavery.  African Americans were now also welcomed into the Union Army, and approximately 180,000 of them eventually served, close to 10% of the total Federal forces.

The Order of Battle

Here is the National Park Service’s map showing the alignment of forces at the battle:

The battle involved massive troop movements over large land areas.  The Union commander, General George McClellan, did not fully coordinate the movements of his troops to take advantage of his 2 to 1 manpower advantage.  Of the approximately130,000 men involved in the battle, about 87,000 were on the Union side while the Confederates fielded about 40,000 men.

The Union Army attacked all along the 4-mile front in a piecemeal, staggered fashion.  This allowed the Confederates to shift men around to counter the Union assaults.  McClellan showed similar caution after the battle when he failed to renew the attack with the relatively fresh troops he had, or pursue Robert E. Lee’s retreating Army of Northern Virginia with vigor.  A short time later, and after the election, Lincoln replaced him, and eventually a year and a half later named Ulysses S. Grant to the command of all Union forces.  Most historians credit Grant’s leadership with the eventual victory.  

The Men Who Fought the Battle

Fitzsimmons explains that the history of the battle and the history of the men who fought the battle are inseparable.  Antietam highlights one of the many great tragedies of the war, its “brother against brother” nature.  There were Marylanders and Virginians in the ranks of both armies, and they faced each other directly at the Sunken Road.   Many of the more senior officers on both sides knew each other, and many had been friends before the war. 

The Union was able to favorably maneuver and move more quickly, and bring on the fight on its terms at Antietam, because it had found a set of lost orders from Lee directing his Army’s movements and scattering it all over Maryland days before.   There was concern that the plans might be a ruse, but a Union officer recognized the handwriting and signature of the Confederate adjutant who drafted the order for Lee because they had worked together in Michigan before the war.  

The first attack at Burnside Bridge on the southern end of the field was led by the 11th Connecticut, under Col. Thomas Kingsbury.  The attack was repulsed by Georgians under the command of General David Jones.  The two were brothers-in- law.  Kingsbury was killed in the assault; Jones did not survive the war.  

On the northern end of the battlefield, the Union commander on the ground and in immediate charge was Edwin Sumner.  He was from Massachusetts and had two sons serving with him.  But, his new son-in-law was a Virginian and on Robert E. Lee’s staff.

Fitzsimmons said:

Of course, my favorite character is Union General Israel Richardson.   His nom de guerre was Fighting Dick.  He was born in Vermont, migrated to Michigan, and had been a soldier but was a farmer when the war broke out.   He was arguably the most pugnacious general on the Union side.   He was looking for re-enforcements for a follow-up attack after his troops had driven the Rebels from the Sunken Road, which had opened up a huge hole in the center of the Confederate line, when he was mortally wounded.   If he had been spared that, and remained to push the issue, the course of the battle might have been very different.

 What to Do After Visiting the Antietam National Battlefield

Antietam Creek Vineyards is within walking distance of several battlefield monuments and is one of several wineries and breweries near the battlefield. More information is available

here.

Shepherdstown, West Virginia is across the Potomac River, about 5 miles away from the battlefield on the road that the Confederates used to retreat. This scenic town is full of shops and restaurants. You can find out more

here.

NB: This account includes two videos. Each is very short. You will enjoy both of them, but please watch at least one.

Duke Ellington’s Artistic and Business Crises

From 1939 to 1941, jazz legend Duke Ellington faced artistic and business crises. Ellington’s orchestra was extremely popular on radio, on tour, and as the house band at Harlem’s fabled Cotton Club. The orchestra’s 1939 tour of Europe was a success.  Unfortunately, a licensing dispute developed between ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) and radio broadcasters.  ASCAP is a clearinghouse; it collects and distributes royalties payable to holders of music-related copyrights. The dispute prevented the music of ASCAP members, including Ellington, from being played on radio.

The ASCAP problem meant that Ellington needed an entire new “book,” or repertoire, for his band.  Ellington turned to his son, Mercer (1919-1996), and to his piano man, writer and arranger, Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967.)  Unlike Ellington, neither Mercer nor Strayhorn was a member of ASCAP and they were not bound by ASCAP’s constraints. Ellington had hired Strayhorn (then only 24) in 1938 after Strayhorn played a version of the band’s hit “Sophisticated Ladies” for Ellington after a show.  In 1941, Strayhorn would prove to be extremely valuable to Ellington.

Ellington also had business problems. He did not own the copyrights to his music, a condition typical of musicians then and now. [1]  Irving Mills, Ellington’s manager from 1926 to 1939, controlled the copyrights.  The problem was compounded because the compositions for which Ellington took writing credit were often developed in a group environment.  Some asserted that Ellington was a “compiler,” not a composer.  Strayhorn came to Ellington’s defense, saying:

So this guy says you and he wrote it, but he thinks he wrote it. He thinks you just put it down on paper. But what you did was put it down on paper, harmonized it, straightened out the bad phrases, and added things to it, so you could hear the finished product. Now, really, who wrote it?  . . . But the proof is that these people don’t go somewhere else and write beautiful music. You don’t hear anything else from them. You do from Ellington.

Ellington’s highest priority was keeping his orchestra together.  It toured incessantly to generate the money necessary to keep it going. The orchestra was Ellington’s instrument—the outlet for his enormous musical creativity.  In a short period of time, he needed to make major changes to his music and to how his intellectual property rights were managed.

Strayhorn to the Rescue: “Take the A Train”

Strayhorn, though quiet and reserved in demeanor, was extremely talented.  His compositions include “Lush Life,” “Satin Doll,” “Chelsea Bridge,” “Day Dream,” “Johnny Come Lately,” “Rain Check” “Clementine” and “Lotus Blossom.” He collaborated with Ellington on “Deep South Suite” (1947), the “Shakespearean Suite” or “Such Sweet Thunder” (1957), an arrangement of the “Nutcracker Suite” (1960) and the “Peer Gynt Suite,” (1962.)  His “Jump for Joy,” (1950) and “My People,” (1963) suites had the struggles and triumphs of African-Americans in the United States as their themes.

The long Ellington-Strayhorn collaboration has been written about extensively. Strayhorn was essential to Ellington for decades. In his autobiography, Music is My Mistress, Ellington refers to Strayhorn as “…my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves are in his head and his in mine.” [2] Here is Ellington on their collaboration:

Oh, Billy Strayhorn is my writing and arranging companion. I may be somewhere, like in Los Angeles, and he’s in New York, and I get to the 17th bar of a number and I decide, well, I think rather than sit here and struggle with this, I’ll call Strays and I’ll call him and say, “Look, I’m in E flat someplace, and the mood is this and you know, this man is supposed to be walking up the road and he reaches a certain intersection and I can’t decide whether he should turn left, right, go straight ahead or make a U-turn.” And he says, “Oh, yes, I know what you mean,” you know? And “Well, I think you could do that better than I could”—that’s his first response, you know? And all the time, he’s thinking about how he can outdo me, you know? And then, and very often without any more than that, we come up with practically the same thing.[3]

Strayhorn and Mercer Ellington spent hours together going over the orchestra’s scores to learn how to write music in Ellington’s style.  Initially, Strayhorn had little confidence in “Take the A Train.”  In one account, Mercer Ellington recalls retrieving the score to “Take the A Train” from the trash because Strayhorn and thrown it out.  Strayhorn thought that the song sounded too much like an arrangement by band leader Fletcher Henderson.

Here is the Ellington orchestra playing “Take the A Train” in a 1943 movie, Reveille With Beverly. A morale-building movie with plenty of Hollywood effects—the orchestra is on a train that is nothing like a New York City subway train—this version includes a vocal by Betty Roche and a solo by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves:

"Take the A Train"--1943

Strayhorn did not play in Ellington’s orchestra and he rarely attended its performances. Here is a 1964 performance of “Take the A Train” that opens with Ellington’s affectionate introduction of Strayhorn. It features a bass solo and scat vocal by Ernie Shepard:

"Take the A Train"--1964

In some accounts, Strayhorn describes the title as about choosing the A train over the D train which only went to 145th Street in New York.  To reach Ellington’s home in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem it was necessary to take the A train.  Other versions describe the title as evolving out of directions that Ellington gave Strayhorn, a Pittsburgh native, on how to get to his house.

How the A Train Runs

“Take the A Train” ultimately kicked off more than 1,000 broadcasts and concerts and became the Ellington band’s signature composition. The song begins with a piano vamp, or short sequence of repeated chords, before the orchestra kicks in at full power with a horn-driven tempo that unmistakably recalls a speeding train.

The song is not a prime example of Strayhorn's compositional style. Walter van de Leur of the Department of Musicology of the University of Amsterdam said that, "its string of choruses, ample solo space against background riffs, and unison saxophone lines with snappy brass answers" align it with standard big-band conventions of the time, but also notes that its harmonies and rhythms anticipate the modernistic turns of bebop.

Expert instrumentalist and ACPS band teacher Richard Seracino describes “Take the A Train” as not particularly challenging to play.  He said, “There’s nothing technically challenging…No range challenges or fast sections.”  Seracino said, “there are lots of train-like stabs all through the arrangement” that contribute to the train effect.  A “stab” is a short heavy accent on a uniform note or chord.  Seracino sees “Take the A Train” this way:

A Train is a pretty standard tune.  It's in A-A-B-A form.  No real crazy chords, with one exception. And this is what makes the tune. The second chord of the song is a dominant chord with a flat 5. This has a unique sound to it.  It allows the soloist to use a whole tone scale. It's just what the name implies, a scale constructed of all whole tones D-E-F#-G#--Bb-C-D (7 notes instead of 8). Interestingly, that chord (D-F#-G#-C) sounds a lot like a train horn. Other than that, it's pretty standard jazz stuff.  The A section ends with a typical 2-5-1 progression (the most common chord progression in jazz). The B section goes up a fourth and ends in a 2-5-1 that brings you back to the A section.  

The sound of the Ellington band of this period is often described as “tight,” or as Seracino describes it, “super tight.”  It is hard to find a universally-accepted definition of musical “tightness.”   It may be enough to think of it as the cohesive sound quality that results from thousands of hours of practicing and performing by some of the best jazz musicians of the era.

Ray Nance’s Trumpet Solo in “Take the A Train”

The original trumpet soloist, Ray Nance, on “Take the A Train” was one of the Ellington band’s most formidable musicians.  Jazz critic Gary Giddins describes Nance’s solo as, “superbly assured and witty, yet delicate and intensely personal.  It was the kind of solo that…soon became as renowned as the written material, and it established Nance as an Ellington star.” [4]  When other trumpet players, notably, Cootie Williams, took over they played Nance’s solo almost note-for note.

Ellington Establishes Tempo Music

By 1940, Ellington had been leading and composing for an orchestra for 20 years.  His recording contract with RCA gave him great latitude, but Ellington went in a different direction. He fired Irving Mills and started his own music publishing firm, Tempo Music, to control his music copyrights.  Tempo Music distributed the music of the Ellington orchestra and small band sessions led by other musicians.  Giddins says:

Strayhorn’s piece (“Take the A Train”) was an immediate hit and soon became the band’s theme and inevitable set opener.  Along with “Flamingo,” it made Tempo Music a going concern.[5]

Listening to Duke Ellington at His Best: The Blanton-Webster Band

Those interested in hearing Ellington’s orchestra at its peak might follow the recommendation of The New York Times Essential Library—Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings by Ben Ratliff (Times Books, New York 2002.)  Ratliff singles out a recording, The Blanton-Webster Band (RCA Bluebird/BMG) (so named because of the contributions of Jimmy Blanton and Ben Webster, two of Ellington’s stalwarts. ) Ratliff says:

Ellington hit a hot streak, regularly turning out benchmark classics at every recording session; The Blanton-Webster Band collects them all.

Information on purchasing The Blanton-Webster Band is available

here.

So, if spirits are down and a lift is needed, we should do as Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn suggest in their timeless composition: Let’s “Take the A Train.”

1. About Alexandria’s distinguished intellectual property counsel advises that musicians can assert intellectual property rights—copyright protection—in two ways for the same musical work. Musicians, or their assignees, can assert copyright protection for compositions (writing music and lyrics) and for music performances. In 2020, Bob Dylan sold his composition rights, or songwriting catalog, to Universal Music Group for over $300 million. About a year later he sold his performance rights, which included his master recordings, to Sony Music Entertainment for an amount reported to be between $150 and $200 million.

2.  Some accounts suggest that Ellington took advantage of Strayhorn by claiming intellectual property rights in compositions that should have belonged to Strayhorn.  Two things are inconvertibly true. First, Strayhorn’s life as an openly gay African-American musician was complicated. Second, Ellington had a deep regard for Strayhorn and his talents. In 1967, Ellington, devastated by Strayhorn's death, eulogized him in touching terms:

He spoke English perfectly and French very well, but condescension did not enter into his mind. He demanded freedom of expression and lived in what we consider the most important and moral of freedoms: freedom from hate, unconditionally; freedom from self-pity (even throughout all the pain and bad news); freedom from fear of possibly doing something that might help another more than it might himself; and freedom from the kind of pride that could make a man feel he was better than his brother or neighbor.

3.  Jazz—A History of America’s Popular Music by Geoffrey C. Ward, (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002) p. 287.

4.  Visions of Jazz—The First Century by Garry Giddins (Oxford University Press, New York, 1998) p. 236.

5. Ibid, p.235.

Bernstein has written five books, two with Woodward. His post-Watergate career also seems overshadowed by the massively productive Woodward (author of 21 books) who regularly turns out fact-intensive insider accounts (for example, his Trump trilogy, Peril, Rage and Fear) and other writings.[1] 

Bernstein is a Silver Spring native and the son of left-wing activist parents who were often under FBI surveillance. When he was a boy, his parents took him to a sit-in to desegregate the Tea Room at the Woodward & Lothrop department store.

His recent book, Chasing History—A Kid in the Newsroom, contains not a word about Watergate or his time at the Post or his misadventures in television news.  Instead, the book describes his obsession with journalism from 1960 when, at 16, he talked his way into a copyboy position on The Washington Evening Star.  Here is Bernstein falling in love with his life’s work as he sees the Star’s newsroom for the first time:

In my whole life I had never heard such glorious chaos or seen such purposeful commotion as I now beheld in that newsroom.  By the time I had walked from one end to the other, I knew that I wanted to be a newspaperman.

In its heyday, the Star, then owned by the Kauffman and Noyes families, outclassed the Post and every other Washington newspaper with a staff of near-legendary reporters. The Star’s decline (it was an afternoon paper that could not overcome the increasing popularity of televised news) accelerated with the ascent of the Post. The Star ceased publishing in 1981.

Chasing History is a self-aware account of Woodard’s obsession with journalism and its people.  Bernstein worked at the Star for six years starting in 1960 when it exemplified a newsroom of ringing phones, clattering typewriters, raffish hard-drinking reporters and demanding editors.[2]  

Copyboys were messenger/assistants who did everything from delivering copy from reporters to editors to fetching coffee. Bernstein glories in the journalistic environment of this period, its traditions, personalities and even its practical jokes—in his earliest days Bernstein was directed by one of the senior reporters to report to the men’s room to wash out the carbon paper.

Besides natural curiosity about people, especially Washingtonians not involved in government, he had several talents that enhanced his work.  He learned to read upside down and was a proficient (almost 90 words a minute) typist and had abundant energy.  Bernstein says on several occasions that he “worked the phones” which appears to be no exaggeration.  His prodigious capacity for work made him the go-to person when the Star’s editors were short-staffed.   

Bernstein covered local government meetings, fires, murders and plane crashes.  His account of showing his Star press pass to administrators at his high school so that he could join other reporters in covering a speech at the school by presidential candidate John F. Kennedy is a highlight.

Bernstein describes the tricks of the trade of police and fire reporters and how they managed to arrive at crime scenes and fires simultaneously with, or before, authorities. He quickly sees the difference between the working styles of firefighters (intense) and detectives (seemingly nonchalant) and learns how to get information from each.

Bernstein also describes the dubious activities of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Prostitution and Perversion squad led by a senior officer, Roy Blick. These officers operated at the edges of legitimate policing.  Blick and his men engaged in entrapment schemes and figured prominently in the downfall of President Lyndon Johnson’s close aide, Walter Jenkins.  Bernstein describes how the FBI sought to use the Star to publicize recordings of Dr. Martin Luther King in compromising situations, an invitation the senior executives at the Star declined. [3]

Chasing History shows Bernstein’s self-awareness and his candor.  He is charmingly frank about his height (5’, 3” at 16), freckles, enthusiasm for journalism and distaste for most of what was offered at Montgomery Blair High School where he barely graduated. He has a comprehensive recall of every teacher, administrator and coach on his uncertain route to graduation.  Bernstein combined an exceptional intelligence with an active distaste for any academic subject that did not interest him.

Good reporters cultivate sources; Bernstein cherished them.  He developed a cataloging system to organize his notes about everyone from Eddie Bernstein (no relation) who led separate lives as a Washington panhandler and a real estate magnate in Florida to Annie, the owner of a downtown newsstand whom Bernstein memorialized in a front page Star obituary, to leading figures in the upper reaches of Washington society.

The Civil Rights movement had a special place in Bernstein’s heart and in his work as a reporter.  He developed sources and friends among the Washington leaders of the Civil Rights movement, notably attorney Joseph Rauh, Stokeley Carmichael and the Reverend Walter Fauntroy. His account of the Star’s pre-Internet logistical arrangements for covering the March on Washington is a highlight.

Bernstein looks affectionately on institutions and places that served and connected Washington’s ordinary residents, not its rotating cast of government mandarins.  Bernstein visits the Glen Echo amusement park, picks out his wardrobe at No-Label Louie’s and later at Lewis & Thos. Saltz, buys pastries at Reeves Bakery, and recalls the adult entertainment of 9th Street, N.W. and the Block in Baltimore. His extensive knowledge of Washington’s diverse neighborhoods (for example, Swampoodle) is remarkable.

Bernstein rises from copy boy to the dictation bank where he and others type up stories dictated by reporters in the field.  Almost on a fluke, he is admitted to the University of Maryland. He continues to work full-time as a reporter and his college grades continue to suffer—he is dismissed from the university for excessive parking tickets, readmitted, dismissed, etc. 

Ultimately, Bernstein’s academics impede his rise—admission to the Star’s training program for reporters required, in the minds of some, a college degree.  A Star editor fatuously tells Bernstein, “Carl, experience is no substitute for the training program.” Bernstein concludes that his time at the Star is over. He gathers his impressive clips file and signs on as a reporter at a newspaper in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a prelude to joining the Post as a reporter in 1966.

Bernstein does remarkably little score-settling in Chasing History.  His generous recollections of his friends and colleagues go back to high school.  He describes his relationships with the Star’s colorful editors and reporters and provides a detailed Epilogue that describes the lives and careers of those he worked with at the Star, many of whom became his life-long friends.

Bernstein celebrates the talents of, among others at the Star, Lance Morrow, Haynes Johnson, David Broder and Mary McGrory whose sentences “danced across the page”.  He looks back in gratitude, not resentment or envy.  He seems to regret not one minute of the after-work drinking at Harrigan’s near the Star’s newsroom to “wait out rush hour” that was customary for Star reporters.

Bernstein does not say this, but here is the math:  when the Watergate burglars were arrested on the night of June 17, 1972, Carl Bernstein, 28, had been a full-time, or nearly full-time, reporter with a major newspaper for 12 years.  Bernstein and Woodward (for once) may have been young reporters, but Bernstein was anything but inexperienced.

1. The notion of Bernstein as Robin to Woodward’s Batman was confirmed in director Alan J. Pakula’s Academy Award-winning movie All the President’s Men (1976.) Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Bernstein’s relentless hustle (Hoffman leans forward for much of the movie) is particularly memorable in two scenes. In one, Bernstein surreptitiously rewrites Woodward’s lede (journalism-speak for the first 30-50 words of a news story.) Woodward (Robert Redford), ever upright and ethical, reads Bernstein’s revised version, objects to Bernstein’s meddling, and says, “Yours is better.” In the second scene, Bernstein shrugs off his reputation as a ladies’ man as he interviews a White House aide who resembles Cassidy Hutchinson in the rooftop bar of the Hotel Washington on 15th Street, NW.

2. Hollywood’s best portrayal of newspapering of this era was His Girl Friday (1940.) The cast, led by Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, revels in breathless rapid-fire dialogue. The movie was directed by Howard Hawks. Grant plays conniving editor Walter Burns who seeks to win back, and re-employ, his ex-wife and ace reporter Hildy Johnson, played by Russell. Bernstein would have been a welcome addition to the cast.

3. For more on the activities of the Metropolitan Police Department and the Lavender Scare of the 1950’s when federal employees were fired for being gay, see the recently-published Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington by James Kirchick.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet enjoyed an impressive run of popular success, particularly for a jazz ensemble, in the second half of the 20th century.  Some jazz followers believe that commercial success devalues musical achievement—a wide audience is a sign of having “sold out.” Their idea is that for jazz to be worthy it must be obscure, even difficult, and appreciated or understood by a select few.  The Dave Brubeck Quartet proved that this is not true.[1]

The video shows an odd sight: the Dave Brubeck Quartet in full flight looked like a group of accountants masquerading as jazz musicians. The quartet was widely popular on college campuses in the 1950’s. In 1954, Brubeck became only the second jazz musician (after Louis Armstrong) to appear on the cover of Time magazine.

Dave Brubeck—Piano

Brubeck was born in 1920 and grew up on his father’s 45,000-acre cattle ranch near Ione, California in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  His mother, Elizabeth, was a highly capable musician. She was tutored by composer Henry Cowell and at one point moved to London—the three children staying on the ranch with their father—to study the piano.  She gave Brubeck piano lessons and taught him how to harmonize Bach chorales. 

Brubeck was drafted into the Army in 1942 and sent to France in 1944. He was discharged in 1946 and went to Mills College in Oakland where he studied with French avant-garde composer Darius Milhaud.   He formed a series of groups and in 1951 he added saxophonist Paul Desmond. The quartet remained together until 1967 when Brubeck disbanded it to focus on composing.

Here is how one critic assessed Brubeck’s popularity and his playing:

The fame and enormous record sales that Brubeck enjoyed were all the more remarkable given the uncompromising nature of his piano work.   His approach to the keyboard was almost totally purged of the sentimental and romantic trappings or the oh-so-hip funkiness that characterized most crossover hits.  His chord voicings were dense and often dissonant.  His touch at the piano was heavy and ponderous—anything but the cocktail bar tinkling fancied by the general public. His music tended to be rhythmically complex, but seldom broached the finger-popping swing of [Oscar] Peterson or [Erroll] Garner.  Only in his choice of repertoire, which was populist to an extreme with its mix of pop songs, show tunes, traditional music—indeed anything from “Camptown Races” to “The Trolley Song” might show up on a Brubeck album—did he make a deferential gesture to the tastes of a mass audience.[2]

Brubeck participated in the State Department’s Jazz Ambassadors program and toured Europe with his group in 1958.  While in Turkey he heard street musicians playing in 9/8 time which prompted his curiosity about the possibilities of jazz in what were then unusual time signatures.

He was declared a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts and awarded the National Medal of the Arts.  In 2009, he received a lifetime achievement award as part of the Kennedy Center Honors.  Brubeck continued performing until his death in 2012.

Paul Desmond—Alto Saxophone

Paul Desmond (born Paul Emil Breitenfeld—“I picked the name Desmond out of the phone book,” he said) was born in San Francisco in 1924.  His father played organ for silent movies, wrote band arrangements and accompanied vaudeville acts.  He began playing the alto saxophone in 1943 when he was stationed in the Army.  He said, “It was a great way to spend the war.  We expected to get shipped out every month, but it never happened. Somewhere in Washington our file must still be on the floor under a desk somewhere.”

In 1987, the accomplished jazz pianist and long-time host of NPR’s Piano Jazz, Marian McPartland, published All in Good Time, a collection of her articles from Esquire and Down Beat magazines.  Her portrait of Desmond is especially affectionate:

For Desmond has a mind that can only be called brilliant—incredibly quick, perceptive, sensitive.  He is also remarkably articulate (his original goal in life was to be a writer, not a musician) with a skill at turning apt and hilarious phrases that leave his friends in hysterics. (p. 55)

Brubeck said that Desmond was “one of the few true individuals on his instrument” and one of very few saxophonists who did not imitate the colossally influential Charlie Parker. 

McPartland said that Desmond “pursuing his own musical ideal, and his distinctive sound—light, liquid, at times mournful—will continue to be an important voice in jazz.”  She quotes Desmond as follows:

I love the way Miles plays.  I still think the hardest thing of all to do is to come up with things that are simple, melodic, and yet new.  Until fairly recently, most of the landmarks in jazz history could be written out and played by practically anybody after they had been done.  It just took a long time for them to be thought of.  There’s a lot more going on now in terms of complexity, but it’s still a long time between steps.

And:

What would kill me the most on the jazz scene these days would be for everybody to go off in a corner and sound like himself.  Let a hundred flowers bloom. 

Diversitysville.  There is enough conformity in the rest of this country without having it prevail in jazz, too.

The critics who saw Brubeck heavy handed on the piano were often entranced by Desmond’s lyricism on the alto saxophone. 

Desmond was a member of the quartet from 1951 to 1967.  For a comprehensive account of Desmond’s music and life see, Take Five—The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (with a forward by Dave and Iola Brubeck) by Doug Ramsey, Parkside Publications, Inc, Seattle, Washington, 2005.  Desmond died in 1977.

Joe Morello—Drums

 Morello (in sunglasses in the video) was born in 1928 in Springfield, Massachusetts where his father was a painting contractor.  His mother taught him the basics of the piano—his extremely poor vision limited his activities.  He was precociously talented on the violin. At about 15, he took up the drums.

Morello honed his skills in various groups in Springfield, Boston and New York.  In 1953 he joined McPartland’s trio where his reputation continued to grow.  In 1956 he joined Brubeck’s group.  Here is McPartland on Morello as a percussionist:

However, Joe is probably the one drummer who has made it possible for Dave to do things with the group that he would have had difficulty accomplishing otherwise.  Joe’s technique, ideas, ability to play multiple rhythms and unusual time signatures, humor, and unflagging zest for playing is a combination of attributes few other drummers have.  All these in addition to his ability to subjugate himself, when necessary, to Dave’s wishes yet still maintain his own personality.

Joe is fascinating to watch play—he may have several rhythms going at one time, tossing them to and fro with the studied casualness of a juggler.  Yet through it all, the inexorable beat of the bass drum (not loud—felt more than heard) holds everything together.  He moves gracefully, with a minimum of fuss, but with a sparkling, diamond-sharp attack, reminiscent of the late Sid Catlett.

In his time with the quartet Morello dominated jazz popularity polls, including the Down Beat magazine Reader’s Poll. 

For rhythmically-challenged people, Morello’s ability to drum in several rhythms simultaneously seems like magic.  Here is a 1995 clip of Morello appearing on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. If you have read this far, please take the time to compare the performance of the saxophonist in this video with Desmond. He is very capable, but his sound is very different than Desmond’s which is much lighter. The performance includes an extended “Take Five” drum solo in which Morello effortlessly manages complicated polyrhythms. At the end, Morello drops a drum stick twice.  Somehow, it does not matter.  

Morello died in 2011.  

 Eugene Wright—Bass 

 Eugene Wright was born in Chicago in 1923.  He originally concentrated on the coronet before teaching himself the string bass.  In 1958, at the Morello’s suggestion, he auditioned for and joined the Dave Brubeck Quartet. 

Wright, a teacher by temperament who was later on a music conservatory faculty, was interested in Brubeck’s time signature experiments.   He bonded immediately with Morello as Brubeck had with Desmond years earlier. Wright said:

Right away, Joe and I were as one. It was like Jo Jones and Walter Page with Count Basie.  It was right from the beginning. When musicians used to ask me how I could play with that band, I told them they weren’t listening.  I told them I was the bottom, the foundation; Joe was the master of time; Dave handled the polytonality and polyrhythms; we all freed Paul to be lyrical. Everybody was listening to everybody. It was beautiful.  The people who couldn’t accept it were looking, not listening.[3]

An integrated jazz group in the 1950’s and 1960’s was the exception, not the norm. Brubeck, Desmond and Morello stood with Wright in difficult circumstances. In 1960, the quartet refused to play 23 dates at Southern colleges and universities because Brubeck would not replace Wright with a white bassist. In 1964, the quartet defied picketing and threats of violence by the Ku Klux Klan and performed before an integrated audience at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.  Wright died in 2020.

Time Out and “Take Five”

The quartet’s most popular recording is the album Time Out, an experiment in jazz that departed from the traditional 4/4 time (four beats to a measure) signature which is often referred to as “common time.”

Most Western music is in 4/4 time and when Time Out was recorded virtually all of jazz was in 4/4 time.  Time Out included works in 9/8 time (“Blue Rondo aﹶ la Turk”) and, most notably, “Take Five” in 5/4 time.  

Brubeck was advised by executives at Columbia Records not to release the album.  The album cover was unconventional: an abstract painting, rather than a picture of the quartet. Even riskier, the album contained exclusively original compositions and no standards.  Even so, Time Out became the first jazz album to sell more than a million copies and the biggest hit ever by an instrumental jazz group.

 “Take Five” was recorded on July 1, 1959 and seemed to embody mid-century American cool.  Morello’s ability to keep time in various time signatures was essential to the experimental aspects of Time Out as was Desmond’s ability to write melodies that would work in 5/4 time.

Here is Brubeck on how “Take Five,” in 5/4 time, came to be:

The original beat—oom-chuckachucka-oomcha/oom-chuckachucka-oomcha—that’s Joe Morello’s beat. I knew I was going to do an album of all different time signatures, and I wanted Paul and Joe to do the five-four.  See, they’d be warming up backstage before a concert, and Joe would say, “Come on, Des, let’s play in five!”  which is very difficult to do when you’ve never played in five.  You’re always stuck with that extra beat. But Paul could do it. So I said to Paul, “Joe’s got this five-four beat, can you put a melody over it? Write it for our next rehearsal.”

Well, “Take Five” was composed in my front room. Paul came to rehearsal with two themes.  The first one was the bridge. And the other theme was the opening theme.  Paul said, “I can’t write a tune in five. I’ve got these two themes but I can’t get them to go anyplace. I said, “Start with this theme and make this your bridge.  And Paul caught on right away.”

I had to fight Paul to call this “Take Five.”  He said, “Nobody knows what that means.”  I said, “Everybody knows what that means except you, Paul!” Since its first release, I haven’t been able to play a concert anywhere in the world without someone screaming for “Take Five.” [4]

“Take Five” is instantly recognizable and has been covered by numerous artists.  The composition swings, but with a complexity that makes it very listenable and it never seems to tire. The fifth beat in each measure braces and enhances Desmond’s soaring saxophone themes without infringing on them.  Morello’s drum solo is interesting and efficient. Brubeck’s account of the origins of “Take Five” in many ways mirrors the Brubeck-Desmond connection at the heart of the quartet’s music.  Here is how critic Whitney Balliett, a Desmond partisan, described the relationship:                      

In its final form, Brubeck, Desmond, Gene Wright on bass and Joe Morello on drums—the Dave Brubeck Quartet was one of the curiosities of jazz.  Brubeck and Desmond were opposites.  Desmond had a light, ethereal tone, and his solos were lyrical and singing and beautifully constructed.  Brubeck, who had studied with Darius Milhaud and had dreamed of fusing jazz and classical music, was a heavy, erratic, passionate player who depended on repetition and difficult harmony for his effects.  He could build a frightening rhythmic momentum with figures of almost no musical interest.  Desmond was a blue summer day; Brubeck was thunder and lightning.  Yet each man insisted that he would never have got anywhere without the other.[5]

The quartet relied on the classical music training of Brubeck, Desmond and Morello, the synergies and dynamism of the Brubeck-Desmond and Morello-Wright relationships, and the collective inclination to musical experimentation.  The combination of an experimental approach with commercial success makes Time Out a jazz landmark.

The quartet’s popularity seemed to cause some jazz critics to take a negative view. And, Brubeck’s piano style turned off some critics while Desmond appears to have been a near universal critical favorite.

In his 1995 book, Cats of Any Color, former Down Beat magazine editor Gene Lees summarized what may be the best perspective on the Dave Brubeck Quartet: "The public was right; the critics were wrong."

The Dave Brubeck Quartet and Time Out: Let’s listen.

[1] In Visions of Jazz—The First Century, Oxford University Press, 1998, a comprehensive and informative history of jazz and jazz musicians, critic Gary Giddins intentionally omits Brubeck and calls him a “popularizer.”  (See p.6)

[2] The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia, Oxford University Press, New York, 1997, p. 257

[3] Dave Brubeck, Time Signatures—A Career Retrospective (4 CD set), Sony Music Entertainment, Inc., 1992, p. 62.

[4] Ibid, p. 12.

[5] American Musicians II, Seventy-one Portraits in Jazz by Whitney Balliett, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996, pp 434-435.

Booth was born in Cainsville, Missouri in 1926 and raised on a farm.  He drew his first cartoon, a race car stuck in the mud, at age 3.  In 1944 he was drafted into the Marine Corps where he worked as a staff cartoonist on the Marines’ magazine, Leatherneck. To the amazement of his friends, he re-enlisted so that he could continue to work as a cartoonist on the magazine.

In 1952, after his discharge from the Marines, he married and moved to New York where he attended the School of Visual Arts. He worked in a series of magazine editorial and art director jobs and submitted cartoons to numerous publications.

Booth thought his big break had arrived when his cartoons were accepted by The Saturday Evening Post.  Shortly after that good news in 1969, the Post ceased publication.  However, his experience there resulted in a referral to The New Yorker’s Editor, William Shawn, who liked what he saw.  The rest is cartoon history.  Booth has published several collections of cartoons and won numerous cartooning awards.

Successful cartooning requires an unusual combination of skills and abilities; very few people possess all of them.  Booth’s long career shows his extraordinary gifts in the art of cartooning.

Cartoonists must be able to draw, not necessarily with fidelity to reality, but in an interesting way that invites us into the scene.  Cartoon admirers talk about the development of a cartoonist’s “line,” or distinctiveness of style.  The line of a cartoonist that works over a long period of time evolves.  For example, the early Doonesbury cartoons that Garry Trudeau did as an undergraduate at Yale are clearly by the same person who is drawing the strip today but the style is much different. Trudeau’s line has become clearer and more effective. The same is true of Booth.

Cartooning seems to be exempt from the “my kid could do that” school of criticism sometimes applied to modern art.  Many people may draw “better” than Booth.  However, Booth’s drawing style is impossible to imitate and essential to the content and effect of his cartoons.  Booth’s line, and the kinetic/frenetic dogs, cats and people he draws, open the door to his unique world.

Cartoonists must come up with something to draw about.  Cartooning is a visual art, but the content of a cartoon comes from human experience and eccentricity, not from the natural world of beautiful sunsets and waterfalls or other scenes that inspire painters and photographers.  Great editorial cartoonists, for example Thomas Nast or The Washington Post’s Herblock or Tom Toles, were gifted visual distillers of political issues.  Booth’s gift is that he can excavate humor, and cartooning material, from daily life and the imagined interactions of his everyman and everywoman characters and their crazed pets.

Here is a brief look at some Booth cartoons with a few suggestions about how they work. Trying to explain humor can be fatal to it; no effort will be made to answer the question, “Why is this funny?” More importantly, each of us should make a personal decision about humor. “Funny for you, not for me” is a fact of life.

A note to state and federal copyright law enforcement authorities: About Alexandria’s distinguished intellectual property counsel advises that the use of the following cartoons in this noncommercial context falls within the “commentary exception” to the general prohibitions of the copyright laws. So there.

The world of a Booth cartoon often centers on a domestic conversation fragment involving Mr. and Mrs. Everyman, a frazzled dog or cat, and a hanging bare lightbulb.  Things in a Booth cartoon often seem to be on the verge of flying apart.  In this one, the coffee maker on the counter on the left is about to explode. The briefcase covered with the hat and lying next to the umbrella, and the plate on the floor, are additional touches of uncertainty.  The inverted caffeinated dog, of course, is the heart of the cartoon.

Booth often seems to put everyone and everything in motion to portray chaos.  Here, as Mrs. Everywoman throws off her apron and sprints for the door the meal tray (and a toupee) explode, the dog whizzes through the dining room and into the kitchen, the cat is attached to the top of the door frame and the pot, for no apparent reason, flies off the stove. The plate rolling on its edge toward us in the right foreground completes the frantic scene.

Comic strip cartoonists work in dialogue.  Single panel cartoonists, such as Booth, must a be adept at writing captions or have someone write captions for them.  Booth writes his own captions which are often long by most cartooning standards. This caption has Ethel interrupting Gus’ dedicated efforts to write fiction with a sandwich and a “story idea” that summarizes her view of their existence on Long Island.

In addition to domestic scenes, Booth has set numerous cartoons in automobile repair garages.  This carton shows a garage with one of his hanging ceiling lights and a racyﹶ poster on the back wall.  The dog is enormous—equal in size to the female mechanic who gives Mr. Ferguson the bad news.  The effect is compounded by the enormous quantity of debris spilling out of the interior of the car and all over the floor—Mr. Ferguson’s car has serious problems and probably won’t be ready today.

Some Booth cartoons seem to be a coda, or add-on, to an undisclosed earlier conversation or series of events.  We don’t know why Mrs. Everywoman thinks she has been rising from the ashes like a phoenix, but her convictions about continuing to do so are obviously very strong.  She forcefully announces her view of things while Mr. Everyman has lowered his newspaper and a typical Booth dog faces us calmly.   In contrast, the cat in the right foreground freaks out.

Booth’s cartoons often involve understatement and a cheerful suspension of the laws of physics. In this one, Mrs. Everywoman ushers her husband off to work while promising to find out why Mom is “agitated. This is an understatement considering Mom is walking around the ceiling with plungers on her shoes and is shaking. Mom on the ceiling recalls the cat in the second cartoon in this series. A little boy looks on from the background while one of Booth’s signature dogs is indifferent to Mom’s situation—it is not even worth turning around to look at.

In Drawing Life, a 2021 film directed by Nathan Fitch, Booth looks back on more than 50 years of cartooning. In the film, David Remnick, The New Yorker’s current Editor, and others describe Booth and his work, various unsolicited proposals of marriage to Booth, and other things. The film is a 23 minute week-brightener. You can see it:

Here

Just for the fun of it: George Booth and his unique cartoons.

[1] The other magazine that paid attention to cartoons during its print heyday was Playboy.  Hugh Hefner started his publishing career as a cartoonist and was always interested in cartoons.  The New Yorker and Playboy always paid cartoonists more than other publications although, of course, the nature of the cartoons each magazine ran was very different.  The New Yorker reportedly pays cartoonists in a range from $700 to $1,500 for each accepted cartoon.  Cartoonists also make money by selling original art.

The National Gallery’s Dutch paintings are especially impressive.  Three paintings by Johannes (or Jan) Vermeer (1632-1675) are foundational works in the collection.  That the museum has three (and possibly a fourth—the attribution is uncertain) paintings by Vermeer is remarkable; only 36 works by Vermeer (out of an estimated total of 60 paintings by the artist) survive.  All are in major museums, except “The Concert,” a masterpiece stolen with 12 other paintings from Boston’s Isabel Stewart Gardner museum in a daring and unsolved 1990 robbery.

Artistic (and political) expression today seem to be in an upward bigger/louder/faster spiral. [1] Vermeer’s quiet and meticulously composed paintings provide welcome relief from our high volume existence. And, if we take the time, the paintings reward close examination.

A short answer to “Why is Vermeer a big deal?” might be, in broad terms, color, light, composition and perspective.  Color refers to the ways an artist selects and uses colors to enhance each other and illustrate the subject.  Light is shorthand for how an artist illuminates a painting—which parts are in light and which are shaded and why.  Composition means the way that shapes are arranged in a painting and the effects created by the arrangement.  Perspective is the vantage point the artist creates for us—the position from which we view the painting.  Each Vermeer painting in the National Gallery shows remarkable mastery of these aspects of painting and the subject of each painting seems to be alive and immediately with us.

Significant appreciation for Vermeer’s work began well after his death.  Since that time, the scholarship about Vermeer’s career and works has been extensive.  This account will not repeat or summarize that work. 

Instead, here are brief highlights of three paintings by Vermeer at the National Gallery and a suggestion for a visit. The museum is easily reached from Alexandria. Vermeer painted many more women than men; each Vermeer in the National Gallery portrays a woman.

The Girl in the Red Hat” (c. 1665)

Andrew Mellon, a banker and Secretary of the Treasury to three presidents, conceived and endowed the National Gallery.  He bought “The Girl in the Red Hat” in 1925 from a dealer for $290,000 (about $4.6 million today.)  Mellon displayed the small (9 x 7 1/8 inches) painting on the piano in his Washington apartment.  The painting is on a wood panel, not canvas.  In 1941, it became the first Vermeer in the museum.

The girl in the painting is seated and has made a half-turn to look at us over the back of a chair. Her arm rests on the back of the chair.  Her mouth is open and her eyes are focused with anticipation as she looks at us from before a neutral backdrop.

Here is what a book published in conjunction with the National Gallery’s almost-legendary 1995 special exhibition of Vermeer’s works said about the colors in “The Girl in the Red Hat:”

The artist’s use of color is exquisite, in both its compositional and psychological aspects. Setting the figure against the muted tones of a tapestry backdrop, Vermeer concentrates his major color accents, red and blue, in two distinct areas, the hat and the robe.  The intensely warm flame-red bordering the girl’s broad, feathered hat dominates, advances, and psychologically activates the image. It heightens the immediacy of the girl’s gaze, an effect Vermeer accentuates by subtly casting its orange-red reflection across her face.  The blue of the robe is cool and recessive, counter-balancing the red.[2] 

The white scarf that cradles her face links the red of the elaborate hat and the blue of the robe. Tiny dots of white suggest her earrings and the underside of the red hat is dark, almost purplish, indicating the absence of light.  The left side of her face is lit suggesting that she may have turned to face us from looking out a window.

The painting’s perspective is anchored by the back of the chair between two lion-head chair finials on which the girl rests her right arm.  This prominent foreground that makes us feel very close to the girl. The white accents on the finials creates the impression that they are gleaming in the light which enters from the right.  The scene is intimate and immediate.

“A Lady Writing” (c. 1665)

“A Lady Writing” was one of the last works by Vermeer to move from private ownership to a museum collection when it was donated to the National Gallery in 1962 by brothers Waldron and Horace Havemeyer, Jr.  The oil on canvas painting, 17 ¼ by 15 ¾ inches, was previously owned by, among others, J. Pierpont Morgan.

A lady, illuminated by a window or light to the left of the scene, looks up at us as she writes a letter.  She has been interrupted in her work but her expression is calm. She and her writing surface are bathed in light in contrast to the dark background.  Her right hand holds a pen and her left hand steadies a piece of paper as she makes a quarter turn toward us. She wears a comfortable yellow robe trimmed in white fur.

Vermeer’s compositional mastery contributes to the painting’s placid mood. Here is a description of how the meticulous composition contributes to the portrayal of a quiet moment:

Vermeer organized his compositional elements so as to enhance the tranquility of the scene.  The woman rests her arms gently on the writing table and turns easily toward the viewer, her chair angled toward the picture plane.  Other than the chair and a fold in the blue drapery that parallels the woman’s arm, few diagonals exist.  Vermeer provided a horizontal and vertical framework for the woman’s form by means of the foreground table and the painting on the rear wall.  Not only does the dark form of the painting provide a chiaroscuro contrast for the woman’s head, its size, which extends two-third of the way across the background wall, relates proportionally to the width of the composition.  Other proportional relationships further indicate the care with which Vermeer conceived his composition. The width of the wall to the right of the picture, for example, is equal to the height of the table, which is half the distance between the bottom of the picture on the back wall and the base of the painting. [3]

Women engaged in domestic activities were a consistent subject for Vermeer and other Dutch painters. “A Lady Writing” invites us to look closely at the details, for example, the way blue table covering is folded and lit.

“Woman Holding a Balance (c. 1664)

American collector Peter A.B. Widener (1834-1915) left “Woman Holding a Balance” (also known as “Woman Weighing Pearls”) to his son, Joseph (1872-1943) on the condition that Joseph bequeath his collection to a museum.  The National Gallery acquired the 15 7/8 by 14 inch painting in 1942.

In this painting a woman is quietly, and intensely, involved in a scene from daily life—she does not engage with us.  A high window from the left illuminates her and, again, the background is muted.

Some interpretations propose that because she may be pregnant the woman is a version of the Virgin Mary with balanced scales that anticipate the life of Christ, his sacrifice and the foundation of the church.

Observers have debated what the woman is weighing: the consensus seems to be strands of pearls and a gold chain.  “Woman Holding a Balance” was described this way:

The Woman Weighing Pearls…also has the naturalness and the noble simplicity of the classic middle period.  Here, too, every detail is significant and indispensable.  The light is mild and harmonious.  Again, the figure, her mood and her delicate action dominate the interior and fill it with a gentle atmosphere.  The subdued centre of the composition is the hand holding the scales, and by very subtle compositional means Vermeer focuses our interest on this action without distracting too much from her whole appearance…The principal clue to the allegorical meaning would be the picture of the ‘Last Judgement’ which hangs behind the woman.  Vermeer probably wanted the viewer to reflect on the material treasures being weighed, and the weighing of souls on Judgement Day.[4]

The Dutch nation was an international mercantile power during Vermeer’s life. In “Woman Holding a Balance” Vermeer’s subject tends to the rewards of that economic success.

Waiting for you in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art: the serene brilliance of Johannes Vermeer.

[1] As legendary rock guitarist Nigel Tufnel explained in the movie This is Spinal Tap when asked why his amplifier loudness settings went to 11:

Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

[2] Johannes Vermeer, National Gallery of Art and Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshhuis, The Hague, Yale University Press, 1995, p. 160.

[3] Ibid. p. 156

[4] Dutch Art and Architecture 1600-1800, Rosenberg, Slive and ter Kuile, Penguin Books, 1980, p.203.

Architecture differs from painting or sculpture because architects need clients. Clients, in turn, have demands and idiosyncrasies. One measure of achievement may be how an architect responds in different eras and settings to a client’s request for the same building, for example, a house.

In 1908, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a house for a Michigan clothing store owner, Meyer May and his wife, Sophie.  About 30 years later, he designed a house a Pennsylvania department store owner, Edgar Kaufmann and his wife, Liliane. The styles, settings, and appearances of these houses seem unrelated but they are alike in their attention to detail, the use of natural light, the elegant arrangement of geometric forms and the integration of nature with living space.

 Wright may be best known for large projects in nontraditional styles, for example, his 1959 Guggenheim Museum, a design involving a series of intricate curves and swirls that contrasts with Manhattan’s rectilinear buildings.  Some view the Guggenheim building itself as sculpture.

Wright’s residential architecture—the May and Kaufmann houses are examples—is equally interesting for different reasons.

The May House

In 1908 Wright was a young architect with experience mostly limited to designing houses in or near his home in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb.  One of his first significant projects outside Illinois came when Meyer May, the owner of a clothing store, asked Wright to design a house.  May and his wife, Sophie, owned an unremarkable rectangular corner lot in the Heritage Hill neighborhood close to Grand Rapids, Michigan’s business district.  Accordingly, the house faces each street which forms the corner.  The lot was roughly the same size as the other properties in the neighborhood.

Residential architecture in the early years of the 20th century often employed classic or colonial elements.  This was not Wright’s plan for the May house.

The May house has a hipped roof and broad eaves. Its bands of windows and forest tones synchronize the house with the wooded landscape.  The garden is integrated into the design of the house with planters and enclosed outdoor spaces.  The bands of art glass windows are positioned to let in maximum light, particularly from a southern exposure.

Wright described the May houses and similar houses as “Prairie” houses, meaning they were designed to be a natural part of the Midwestern landscape.  The half walls under the eaves create exterior spaces for relaxing, dining or watching the street scene from a sheltered vantage point.

 This picture, taken from sidewalk corner, does not do the May house justice. 

More complete, and very compelling, visual representations of the harmonious May house exterior and interior (Wright wanted to design everything, including furniture and interior fixtures) are available:

here.

This picture is of what would be considered the back of the May house.  The attention to detail and the arrangement of geometric elements combine to eliminate any awkwardness, even at the rear of the house.  Tours of the May house are led by a staff of proud and dedicated docents.

The May house fell into disrepair, even becoming a multi-unit rental property in the 1960s.  In 1985, the Steelcase Company, a Grand Rapids-based manufacturer of office equipment and furniture, acquired the May house and conducted a meticulous, and expensive, restoration that honored Wright’s original exterior and interior designs.

The Kaufmann House

For Alexandrians, the May house is some distance away but the Kaufmann house is an easy day trip to Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands region south of Pittsburgh. 

Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann owned woodland property that included part of Bear Run, a fast-moving stream.  In 1938 they asked Wright to design a weekend retreat. When the Kaufmanns hired Wright in the depths of the Great Depression he had very little work and his career was thought to be essentially over.  The advent of new architectural styles based on a seemingly more modern aesthetic was thought to render Wright’s ideas obsolete.

Many accounts describe Wright, a difficult man with a huge ego on his best days, as procrastinating extensively in designing the Kaufmann house until Edgar Kaufmann declared that he was coming to Wright’s studio, Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin to review the plans.  Wright, the story goes, gathered his associates and apprentices around him and, in one sitting, designed Fallingwater, as the house came to be called.  The house is one of the iconic buildings of the 20th century.  When Kaufmann arrived, Wright supposedly said, “Come in, Mr. Kaufmann, we’ve been waiting for you.”

Wright lore and anecdotes usually seem to highlight his arrogant personality and compelling artistic vision.  Much of commercial architecture today is a committee effort to maximize usable space to make a building an efficient generator of cash (for example, the buildings along K Street in Washington, D.C.)  Wright had other objectives.

Unlike the May house’s constrained rectangular urban lot, Wright could site the Kaufmann house almost anywhere along or near Bear Run.  In a stroke of imaginative genius, Wright located the house above a waterfall in the stream.  Wright again brought light into the house and integrated the building with its natural surroundings.

Seen from above, Fallingwater seems to be a group of carefully stacked giant trays that create outdoor spaces with privacy that invites gathering and conversation. 

Anchoring the house, which seems to float in space, to the land proved to be an engineering challenge.  Fallingwater’s foundation structure has been redone at substantial expense.

Wright again designed not only the structure and exterior of the house but also its interior furnishings.  Fallingwater is unique, or nearly so, among Wright’s houses in that almost all of the original furnishings are still in the house.  The completeness of the house fires the imagination of visitors. Wright selected the interior finishes and appointments and used a color scheme that featured his favorite dark red tone.   

This picture shows a unique design element: an interior stairway to the stream below.  The rough stone chimney at the left contrasts with the sleek glass and metal surfaces.  One of the numerous outside terraces is visible at the rear and right.   

Houses are not museums and a house that becomes a museum is necessarily subject to limits and compromises involving the number of visitors at one time and where those visitors can go on the property.  The guided tour of Fallingwater is fascinating but advance arrangements are required.  You can find out more about the tour, and the house:

here.

The May House and Fallingwater: Why They Matter

Architecture has been described as the most public of arts.  Nobody “collects” architecture or displays it privately or in a museum.  Architecture is present, for good or not, for everyone to see and experience.  Whether we look and see (which are different things) or not is up to us.  The universality of architecture makes Wright’s accomplishments with these two houses even more impressive.

The May house and Fallingwater differ in how they relate to their settings, how they were constructed and in overall design.  Yet, there are pronounced similarities in their use of natural light and materials and the interweaving of interior and exterior spaces. Wright, who was given to aphorisms and pronouncements, said, “Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.”  These houses share an elegant design simplicity and repose gracefully in their very different settings.

The May house and Fallingwater also share a singular and enduring quality of design excellence: timelessness.  They are not dated.  Each house is of its time and also of our time and each is a unique, complete and successful entirety.  

The May house and Fallingwater: See them when you can.

NB: If you do not play this video you will miss something great!

Motown bass guitarist James Jamerson’s three repeated bass notes opening “My Girl” by the Temptations are one of the most familiar song introductions in popular music.  The Temptations came together from two Detroit groups: the Primes, with Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams and the Distants with Melvin Franklin and Otis Williams.  Motown founder and mastermind Berry Gordy changed the name of the Primes to the Temptations.  “My Girl’s” lead singer, David Ruffin, was the last to join the group in 1961. He became a Temptation partly at the insistence of his brother, Jimmy, also a singer.

Jimmy Ruffin said:

David didn’t want to join that group and they didn’t want him in the group. I was like David’s manager by proxy, him being the younger brother.  I suggested that they should have David join the group, because I had been trying to get David signed with Motown and they didn’t want to sign him.1 

“My Girl” was one of a string of hit records for the the Temptations. The group, with 35 Top 40 hits in 11 years beginning in 1964, had more hits than any other Motown group, except the Supremes.

The Temptations persuaded Motown legend Smokey Robinson and his fellow Miracle and writing partner, Ronnie White, to let them record “My Girl” instead of Robinson and White’s group, the Miracles.  Robinson, who knew or at least suspected that the song would be a hit, made a shrewd artistic decision: for “My Girl” he elevated his role as a songwriter over his role as a member of the Miracles. Ruffin’s powerful and urgent voice would balance the song’s sweetness—“a sweeter song than the birds in the trees”—in the words of Robinson’s lyrics.

The song was recorded over two months in the fall of 1964 and released on December 21, 1964.  Gordy, ever the capitalist, gave Motown songwriters a $1,000 bonus for Number One songs.  Robinson and White collected their bonus: “My Girl” reached the top of the R&B and Pop charts in early 1965.

David Ruffin, born in 1941 in Whynot, Mississippi, became a compelling singer and a mesmerizing dancer.  Kendricks, Franklin and Paul Williams had been the lead singers on earlier Temptations songs, but Robinson saw something special in Ruffin. He said:

But I knew David was in there, man. He was like a sleeping giant. So, if I could get a hit on him, man, they would be multi-faceted.  I had also used Paul Williams’ voice on a few things.  In fact, the first record I ever recorded on them was a thing called “I Want a Love I Can See,” and I used Paul Williams’ voice. But “My Girl” was written specifically with David Ruffin in mind.2

The video shows the Temptations working on “My Girl” in Studio A, the basement of Hitsville U.S.A., the round-the-clock recording studio that Gordy established in a rowhouse on Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard.  Hitsville is now the center of the fascinating Motown Museum. 

More information about the museum is available:

here.

The video shows the cherub-faced Robinson in headphones and a turtleneck conducting in the background and some of Motown’s accomplished session musicians, the Funk Brothers, including legendary bassist Jamerson and drummer Benny Benjamin.  A 2002 documentary, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, describes the Funk Brothers and their essential, but not widely appreciated, contributions to Motown. Information on the movie is available:

here.

Motown provided session work to a wide variety of musicians.  The video also shows a nattily-attired string section that could be musicians from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and a full horn section.

The latter part of the video shows the Temptations performing before a live audience and contains scenes of their remarkable choreography.  The group practiced for two hours a day or more under the direction of dancer and choreographer Cholly Atkins of Motown’s Artist Development Department.  Their signature move, the Temptations Walk, and their glides, dips, spins and hand movements, emphasized the story line of each song with precise coordination. The Temptations in performance were an aural and a visual experience.

“My Girl” is great art. The song seems inevitable and obvious and it is neither. Surely, almost anyone could write a song in a “My Girl’s” stately waltz tempo about a lover whose beloved provides, “sunshine on a cloudy day.” It took Robinson and White to do it. Their artistry, and that of Ruffin and the others at Motown who made “My Girl,” conceals itself—a sign of high artistic achievement. There is a controversy over whether Bob Dylan actually called Robinson, “America’s greatest living poet,” but the idea is worth thinking about.

Here is critic Dave Marsh on Motown’s remarkable ability to combine diverse talents to generate musical masterpieces like “My Girl”:

Once you begin to delve into the depths of the Motown story, what impresses you most is the delicious particularity of each of those records.  If Motown is as much the story of Jamerson’s bass lines and Eddie Holland’s lyrics as it is of Diana Ross’s vocals and Smokey Robinson’s songs, it is more than anything the product of the moments when several of those distinguished components came together.  Just listen to the opening seconds of the Temptations’ “My Girl” in which the archetypal Jamerson bass line sets up the perfection of Robinson’s rhymes within the rasping ache of David Ruffin’s voice.  Which is not to slight gorgeous harmonies the rest of the Tempts provide, or Benjamin’s driving drum rolls, or some of the sharpest finger pops in the history of recorded sound.  By the time Ruffin gets ‘round to declaring, “I’ve got all the riches, baby, one man can claim,” the listener feels as wealthy as Ruffin.”3

Yes, that’s it.

In 1923, Duncan Phillips, an heir to the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company fortune, acquired Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s 1881 painting, The Luncheon of the Boating Party, for a museum he founded in 1921 in a Dupont Circle townhouse in Washington, D.C. Phillips paid a dealer who had acquired the painting from Renoir the astounding sum of $125,000 (about $2 million today.)  Phillips had pursued the painting for several years for the museum known today as the Phillips Collection which you can explore:

here.

Phillips wrote his treasurer, “The Phillips Memorial Gallery is to be the possessor of one of the greatest paintings in the world … It will do more good in arousing interest and support for [the Phillips Memorial Gallery] than all the rest of our collection put together. Such a picture creates a sensation wherever it goes.”  His prediction was correct.

The painting was first shown at the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 1882 when three critics identified it as the best painting in the show. At about four feet wide and six feet tall, the Boating Party is an expansive and majestic work of light, color and action.  Almost all of the models—13 in all--in the painting have been identified as friends of Renoir. The girl in the foreground with the dog became Renoir’s wife.  A complete account of who’s who in the Boating Party is in a 2017 Art News article that can be seen:

here

In an era when artworks can seem opaque or obscure, the Boating Party is supremely accessible.  When we encounter the Boating Party our view travels clockwise from face to face—some of the faces are fully illuminated and others are partly in shadow.  The railing on which two characters lean, and the frame of the sheltering tent, guide the receding visual perspective.  Thus, we look into the scene, not just at it.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, the dishonest golf pro Jordan Baker says, “And I like large parties.  They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”   The 13 figures in the Boating Party are in intimate conversations or individual pursuits—enjoying the weather or cuddling a dog.  The painting affirms that relaxation and engagement are not mutually exclusive and celebrates the pleasures of a gathering of friends. 

For a large portrait of a large group of people enjoying an outdoor meal there is very little food evident in the Boating Party.  Renoir does not portray people eating lunch, but rather shows the enjoyable interval after the food has been consumed and everyone is content to relax and talk.

The Boating Party has fascinated collectors for decades.  Edward G. Robinson, the great Hollywood tough guy star (Double Indemnity, Little Caesar, Key Largo and many other movies) and art collector said:

Ah yes, I remember well what it was like to be a true collector, that soft explosion in the heart, that thundering inner ‘yes” when you see something you must have or die.  For over thirty years I made periodic visits to Renoir’s ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’ in a Washington museum, and stood before that magnificent masterpiece hour after hour, day after day, plotting ways to steal it. 1

Duncan Phillips’ great collecting rival was Dr. Albert Barnes who avidly collected a large quantity of French Impressionist paintings, including an amazing 181 works by Renoir.  These paintings are displayed in the extensive Barnes Collection in Philadelphia. More information about the Barnes Collection is available:

here.

A story involves Dr. Albert Barnes and Duncan Phillips standing in front of the Boating Party when, according to The New York Times, this conversation ensued:

That's the only Renoir you have, isn't it?" asked the redoubtable Dr. Barnes, whose idiosyncratic more-is-more art collection is in the Barnes Foundation.  Phillips's reply was succinct: "It's the only one I need.2 

Another perceptive admirer of the art of painting, a distinguished professor of architectural history, said of the Boating Party, “I like it because I can hear the people talking.” 

Just across the river—a short trip by any means—the Boating Party waits for you.

Linda Greenhouse’s Justice on the Brink—The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court is short (242 pages) and highly illuminating. The book should be read by anyone who cares about the role of the Supreme Court in American life and the trajectory of the court’s decisions on numerous important issues.

Greenhouse, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the court for The New York Times for more than 30 years, is a lucid, succinct and compelling writer. Her book shows an unparalleled command of the facts and issues in the 58 cases the court heard in the 2020-21 term and the decisions that preceded those cases. Justice on the Brink shows how cases are positioned for decision by the court by litigation advocacy organizations on the left and right of the political spectrum.

The book shows how the justices signal their views, sometimes in a few cryptic words in an order or concurrence, on issues of racial equality, voting rights, religious expression, the death penalty and, of course, the right to abortion.

Justice on the Brink deftly sketches the personalities of the justices, the evolution of their thinking on issues before the court and the dynamics of the increasingly bitter confirmation process for nominees to the court, notably the contentious nomination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and rushed confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

The book contains fascinating descriptions of the efforts of Chief Justice John Roberts to maintain the public perception of the Court as an independent institution above politics by forming unusual alliances with other justices to reach a 5-vote majority and by deciding cases on the narrowest possible grounds.

Greenhouse details how the conservative justices have increasingly focused on the First Amendment’s Free Expression clause to affect the debate about the role of religion in American life.

Justice on the Brink’s description of the challenge to the 2020 presidential election filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in State of Texas v. Commonwealth of Georgia, State of Michigan, and State of Wisconsin is especially interesting. Texas argued that election irregularities in other states disenfranchised its citizens. Greenhouse provides a masterful and objective account of what may be one of the strangest cases ever filed in the Supreme Court. Here is a portion:

While the Texas filing was odd, the case would soon get odder. Two days later, a lawyer representing Donald Trump filed a motion to intervene in support of Texas. The motion strung together a set of indisputable facts, drawing from them a completely unsupported inference. For example: “Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, down to the Republican candidates and [sic] the state and local level, all out-performed expectations and won in much larger numbers than predicted, yet the candidate for President at the top of the ticket who provided those coattails did not himself get over his finish line in first place.” Except for the assumption that these down-ballot Republican victories came on Trump’s coattails, this was an accurate statement of what had occurred on November 3. But then came the inference: “These things just don’t normally happen, and a large percentage of the American people know that something is deeply amiss.”

Could a lawyer admitted to practice in the Supreme Court actually offer such an argument as a reason to permit the president of the United States to come before the court and claim that somewhere, somehow, in some unspecified manner, victory had been stolen from him? (pp. 102-103)

Greenhouse is not optimistic about the future of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the decision that affirmed the constitutional right to abortion access established in Roe. Anyone who wants to understand where the Court is likely to go in this area, and in other controversial issues, should read this book.