It's too bad that one needed to consult The Guardian, the great English newspaper, to find out what the U.S. press has apparently ignored: that last week's crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street protests all over the country was coordinated by the Federal Government through the Department of Homeland Security. I've listened to people I know well denounce the camps as counter-productive or even pick up the line put out by the right-wing radio mob that these people are just a bunch of unkempt radicals.
There was some reaction against the Chancellor of UC Davis when the campus police proceeded to pepper-spray supine and unresisting students. It's appalling to me that we accept this kind of conspiratorial suppression by our government. Where are the Second Amendment stalwarts when the authorities truly have gone out of control?
The Guardian columnist had it right, I'm afraid. All of the politicians are bought and paid for. So are all administrations. And even when the New York Times finally gets around to covering the sordid record of the New York police in beating up reporters and other neutral onlookers, it limits its coverage and opinions to that narrow bit of self-protection.
I doubt I would ever join one of the Occupy camps. But they are protesting the right things--the giveaways to the rich, the banks, and the well-connected. We have lost much of what we supposedly believe in when we fail to defend the rights of these people. We have created a monster--a Department of "Homeland Security" that acts like the secret police we denounce in totalitarian countries. It absorbs a huge budget we cannot afford and wastes billions on adding yet more expensive devices at airports with domineering agents who harrass travellers and have never been shown to have detected a single terrorist.
It has come to pass that in enabling the authoritarians among us to establish this order of things we have truly allowed the terrorists to win.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
J. Edgar
What might most astound J. Edgar Hoover were he alive today is that until Clint Eastwood brought out his new film, J. Edgar, many people, especially those born during the last 40 or 50 years, would have no idea who he is or was. This, of course, was a man who was arguably as powerful as any during much of his 48 1/2 year reign as Director of the FBI. The picture, by the way, is excellent, with Leonardo di Caprio giving a good rendition of the short, bulldog-type that Hoover was and Armie Hammer probably a good deal more attractive than was Hoover's longtime chief aide and likely lover, Clyde Tolson.
Roger Ebert rightly commends Eastwood for avoiding the temptation to make the movie salacious. After all, we really don't know the truth here anyway. But we do know that Hoover was monomaniacal and managed to hold on during seven presidents because he had dirt on all of them. Leaving aside his total wild-eyed attitude toward Communism (and all leftists, for that matter), Hoover had some good attributes in his early days. He was honest and the Bureau of Investigation he found was a sewer of corruption which he cleaned up. He was an early advocate of forensic scientific crime-solving and established the FBI's fingerprint system.
After that, it was mostly downhill. He was a publicity nut and staged arrests to get the coverage. He provided support for movies and radio and TV programs that built his image. And perhaps most interestingly for Washington types, he was the consummate bureaucrat. After all, every year he argued and usually got a bigger budget allocation by pointing to rising crime. But he balanced what might sound like an indicator of failure by then showing that the FBI had caught more criminals every year.
Most fascinating of all was his relationship with other men with big jobs and big egos. He seemed to manage every presidential transition by showing the slightest bit of whatever dirt he had in his secret files. He correctly sensed that Richard Nixon was never to be trusted even if they shared many political positions. One question I've always thought about and which neither this film nor any other source has ever answered is how the great man of integrity who happened to be Attorney General in 1924 (because he was Calvin Coolidge's college classmate) felt about his protege, Hoover, twenty years later, after Harlan Fiske Stone had gone on to become Chief Justice (he died in 1946). Did Stone, one of the great liberal (Republican) justices, ever pick up on Hoover's increasingly evil character?
It's hard to realize today how many famous people Hoover either conned or scared into shilling for him. Quentin Reynolds and Don Whitehead were only two of the great reporters who put out glorious puff pieces in their books about the FBI. And while he was in power, few questions were ever asked about his priorities in law enforcement. He avoided going after organized crime, because he feared his agents would be corrupted. As the Department of Justice's successful war against the Cosa Nostra after his death has shown, he was wrong about that. He instead always went after the Communists. It took us years to learn (Sam Roberts's book, The Brother, is on point here) that while Julius Rosenberg was indeed guilty, the crime was hardly the "crime of the century" as Hoover labelled it. After all, the Russians already had what they needed from Klaus Fuchs to make the atomic bomb.
Fortunately the laws were amended after Hoover's death to ensure we'd never have such a long-tenured FBI chief. And there is a lesson in his life, only it's far more complex than these stories normally are.
Roger Ebert rightly commends Eastwood for avoiding the temptation to make the movie salacious. After all, we really don't know the truth here anyway. But we do know that Hoover was monomaniacal and managed to hold on during seven presidents because he had dirt on all of them. Leaving aside his total wild-eyed attitude toward Communism (and all leftists, for that matter), Hoover had some good attributes in his early days. He was honest and the Bureau of Investigation he found was a sewer of corruption which he cleaned up. He was an early advocate of forensic scientific crime-solving and established the FBI's fingerprint system.
After that, it was mostly downhill. He was a publicity nut and staged arrests to get the coverage. He provided support for movies and radio and TV programs that built his image. And perhaps most interestingly for Washington types, he was the consummate bureaucrat. After all, every year he argued and usually got a bigger budget allocation by pointing to rising crime. But he balanced what might sound like an indicator of failure by then showing that the FBI had caught more criminals every year.
Most fascinating of all was his relationship with other men with big jobs and big egos. He seemed to manage every presidential transition by showing the slightest bit of whatever dirt he had in his secret files. He correctly sensed that Richard Nixon was never to be trusted even if they shared many political positions. One question I've always thought about and which neither this film nor any other source has ever answered is how the great man of integrity who happened to be Attorney General in 1924 (because he was Calvin Coolidge's college classmate) felt about his protege, Hoover, twenty years later, after Harlan Fiske Stone had gone on to become Chief Justice (he died in 1946). Did Stone, one of the great liberal (Republican) justices, ever pick up on Hoover's increasingly evil character?
It's hard to realize today how many famous people Hoover either conned or scared into shilling for him. Quentin Reynolds and Don Whitehead were only two of the great reporters who put out glorious puff pieces in their books about the FBI. And while he was in power, few questions were ever asked about his priorities in law enforcement. He avoided going after organized crime, because he feared his agents would be corrupted. As the Department of Justice's successful war against the Cosa Nostra after his death has shown, he was wrong about that. He instead always went after the Communists. It took us years to learn (Sam Roberts's book, The Brother, is on point here) that while Julius Rosenberg was indeed guilty, the crime was hardly the "crime of the century" as Hoover labelled it. After all, the Russians already had what they needed from Klaus Fuchs to make the atomic bomb.
Fortunately the laws were amended after Hoover's death to ensure we'd never have such a long-tenured FBI chief. And there is a lesson in his life, only it's far more complex than these stories normally are.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Lucia Remains Indestructible
It had been a long time since I last had seen Lucia di Lammermoor, a gem of the late bel canto school that has long been a staple of the opera repertory since Donizetti composed it in 1835. I suppose it's pretty awful when you can't recall who you heard sing it at the Met some years ago, but I know it wasn't Joan Sutherland. I would definitely have remembered her.
Despite the idiotic plot--even by opera standards--the opera works. Perhaps it's because in addition to the very famous Mad Scene (best described as the next-to-last scene because they mess around with how many acts there are), the composer wrote a whole bunch of other wonderful melodies that allow each of the four principal voices a chance to shine. I was lucky enough to go twice, once for the dress rehearsal and then with friends from out of town for a regular performance a week later.
The opera is based on Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, a potboiler of the 19th century which, I learned from the program, was based on a real story, which is too bad, because the events are grim--a young bride forced into marriage against her will with a rich guy to save her brother's estate which he stole from the tenor with whom she is in love--get it? The performances I saw were balanced--sopranos were good, including in the slightly differently orchestrated Mad Scene, where an ancient instrument called a glass armonica was used instead of the traditional solo flute accompanying the coloratura in her trills and scales; second tenor was better than the first, but first baritone, Michael Chioldi, who plays Enrico, the miserable brother, was superb, a fact missed by the Washington Post, which spent most of the review decrying the production.
The production presumes a ruined estate so it is spare but with all kinds of unnecessary effects added in, apparently to distract you from the plot. There's a bed for the girlish Lucia which looks like a crib and they appear to tie her up at one point; there are also unwarranted hints of incest and the ending, where the tenor commits suicide, is confused. The music is so good--I've been humming it for the past two weeks--that none of that matters a bit. One can't say that there's much humor in this kind of opera, but I never see it without reflecting on how the wedding has to be the worst one ever, and the luckless wealthy bridegroom seems so cocky and confident--and totally unaware of what awaits him the moment he reaches the wedding bedroom.
In
Despite the idiotic plot--even by opera standards--the opera works. Perhaps it's because in addition to the very famous Mad Scene (best described as the next-to-last scene because they mess around with how many acts there are), the composer wrote a whole bunch of other wonderful melodies that allow each of the four principal voices a chance to shine. I was lucky enough to go twice, once for the dress rehearsal and then with friends from out of town for a regular performance a week later.
The opera is based on Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, a potboiler of the 19th century which, I learned from the program, was based on a real story, which is too bad, because the events are grim--a young bride forced into marriage against her will with a rich guy to save her brother's estate which he stole from the tenor with whom she is in love--get it? The performances I saw were balanced--sopranos were good, including in the slightly differently orchestrated Mad Scene, where an ancient instrument called a glass armonica was used instead of the traditional solo flute accompanying the coloratura in her trills and scales; second tenor was better than the first, but first baritone, Michael Chioldi, who plays Enrico, the miserable brother, was superb, a fact missed by the Washington Post, which spent most of the review decrying the production.
The production presumes a ruined estate so it is spare but with all kinds of unnecessary effects added in, apparently to distract you from the plot. There's a bed for the girlish Lucia which looks like a crib and they appear to tie her up at one point; there are also unwarranted hints of incest and the ending, where the tenor commits suicide, is confused. The music is so good--I've been humming it for the past two weeks--that none of that matters a bit. One can't say that there's much humor in this kind of opera, but I never see it without reflecting on how the wedding has to be the worst one ever, and the luckless wealthy bridegroom seems so cocky and confident--and totally unaware of what awaits him the moment he reaches the wedding bedroom.
In
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Siegfried
It has seemed that the only times I've attended the Met Opera HD live broadcasts in movie houses have been the broadcasts of the Wagner Ring operas. Saturday we went to see Siegfried, for the first time managing to cadge seats at the Mazza Gallery theater in DC--probably got tix because it has become popular enough to take over two separate theaters in the complex on Saturday afternoons.
For the Ring opera, it helps that Rheingold is short and Die Walkure is highly exciting, culminating in a third act that opens with the Ride and proceeds to Wotan's Farewell and Fire Music. The fourth and final opera, Goetterdaemerung (literally translated as "getting darker of the gods") also has some memorable music, with Siegfried's Rhine Journey and his death procession and the marvelous redemption-themed music for Brunnhilde as the cycle comes to its rousing finale (the stage directions call for Valhalla to crumble and the Rhine to overflow its banks--nice easy matters to include in a production). Siegfried, the third of the operas, is the problem one. It's very long--running yesterday from shortly past noon until after 5 PM--sometimes it even runs longer. The music does not have the memorable parts mentioned for the other operas.
Yesterday, however, it came brilliantly to life. The Wagnerian tenor was the cover who rsoe to stardom, Jay Hunter Morris, and he benfitted from playing the first act opposite the veteran Gerhard Siegel as Mime, the evil dwarf. The two of them made the opera come alive, culminating in the end-of-act Forging Song, when Siegfried remakes his father's famous weapon. In the second act, the new Siegfried had the wonderful Eric Owens making a brief appearance as the most evil of the dwarves, Alberich, and then the encounter with Fafner, the giant turned dragon. It was satisfying to see him appear as a true dragon rather than the rather abstractly-formed creature he has been designed to appear as in past Met productions.
On to Act III, when Wotan, the central character of the first two operas and much of this one, finally bows out after realizing that he has been unable to fulfill his own goal of preserving the gods and the world as he knows it. I thought I knew the Ring pretty well but I learned from his encounter with Erda the earth goddess that she had consorted with him to produce Brunnhilde. And then Siegfried finally encounters Wotan in the latter's last appearance and shatters Wotan's mighty spear just as it had broken Siegfried's father, Siegmund's sword in the great fight in Die Walkure.
Yes, more plot than you're looking to know. But the music always is the mightiest force on stage and of course, we finally return to the rock where Brunnhilde was left at the end of Walkure and get to hear tenor and soprano engage in the most wonderful love music since maybe Tristan und Isolde. The Met broadcasts feature interviews with the principal cast members, which added to the experience immeasurably. I even got a kick out of the Forest Bird, represented by a three-dimensional figure and sung by an offstage soprano, which warns Siegfried of all the dangers posed by the dwarves and dragons roaming the set. On Sir Georg Solti's wonderful first complete recording of The Ring, one of the lagniappes was hearing Joan Sutherland sing the Forest Bird, sort of like Pavarotti doing the Italian Tenor in R. Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier.
The most marvelous result of this long afternoon's experience was to recognize the greatness of Siegfried, an opera often overshadowed by the others in the series. Partly this was due to the immediacy you get from the closeups of the theater broadcastand the quick understanding you get from the sub-titles. Those together make it possible to savor the richness of Wagner's music and wonder as always how he did it (especially given his own miserable personality, as to which, see Deems Taylor's little masterpiece of an essay, The Monster.)
For the Ring opera, it helps that Rheingold is short and Die Walkure is highly exciting, culminating in a third act that opens with the Ride and proceeds to Wotan's Farewell and Fire Music. The fourth and final opera, Goetterdaemerung (literally translated as "getting darker of the gods") also has some memorable music, with Siegfried's Rhine Journey and his death procession and the marvelous redemption-themed music for Brunnhilde as the cycle comes to its rousing finale (the stage directions call for Valhalla to crumble and the Rhine to overflow its banks--nice easy matters to include in a production). Siegfried, the third of the operas, is the problem one. It's very long--running yesterday from shortly past noon until after 5 PM--sometimes it even runs longer. The music does not have the memorable parts mentioned for the other operas.
Yesterday, however, it came brilliantly to life. The Wagnerian tenor was the cover who rsoe to stardom, Jay Hunter Morris, and he benfitted from playing the first act opposite the veteran Gerhard Siegel as Mime, the evil dwarf. The two of them made the opera come alive, culminating in the end-of-act Forging Song, when Siegfried remakes his father's famous weapon. In the second act, the new Siegfried had the wonderful Eric Owens making a brief appearance as the most evil of the dwarves, Alberich, and then the encounter with Fafner, the giant turned dragon. It was satisfying to see him appear as a true dragon rather than the rather abstractly-formed creature he has been designed to appear as in past Met productions.
On to Act III, when Wotan, the central character of the first two operas and much of this one, finally bows out after realizing that he has been unable to fulfill his own goal of preserving the gods and the world as he knows it. I thought I knew the Ring pretty well but I learned from his encounter with Erda the earth goddess that she had consorted with him to produce Brunnhilde. And then Siegfried finally encounters Wotan in the latter's last appearance and shatters Wotan's mighty spear just as it had broken Siegfried's father, Siegmund's sword in the great fight in Die Walkure.
Yes, more plot than you're looking to know. But the music always is the mightiest force on stage and of course, we finally return to the rock where Brunnhilde was left at the end of Walkure and get to hear tenor and soprano engage in the most wonderful love music since maybe Tristan und Isolde. The Met broadcasts feature interviews with the principal cast members, which added to the experience immeasurably. I even got a kick out of the Forest Bird, represented by a three-dimensional figure and sung by an offstage soprano, which warns Siegfried of all the dangers posed by the dwarves and dragons roaming the set. On Sir Georg Solti's wonderful first complete recording of The Ring, one of the lagniappes was hearing Joan Sutherland sing the Forest Bird, sort of like Pavarotti doing the Italian Tenor in R. Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier.
The most marvelous result of this long afternoon's experience was to recognize the greatness of Siegfried, an opera often overshadowed by the others in the series. Partly this was due to the immediacy you get from the closeups of the theater broadcastand the quick understanding you get from the sub-titles. Those together make it possible to savor the richness of Wagner's music and wonder as always how he did it (especially given his own miserable personality, as to which, see Deems Taylor's little masterpiece of an essay, The Monster.)
Sunday, October 30, 2011
The Ides of March and Pauline Kael
Today I finally caught up with The Ides of March, the movie starring George Clooney and featuring Ryan Gosling, Paul Giamatti, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Terrific picture, and all my D.C. political types tell me it couldn't be closer to the truth. Good entertainment and yet, you leave the theater with a better feeling for having seen it and received a good dose of reality as the political campaign heats up for us.
The Sunday Times had a front-page review by Frank Rich of a biography and collected writings of Pauline Kael. Many will remember her as the very outspoken movie critic of The New Yorker back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. She had lots of faults--too cozy relationships with some movie industry types for one--but she also had an enthusiasm that is lacking in too many critics today. It turned out that her famous piece, "Raising Kane," about how Herman J. Manckiewicz deserved at least equal credit with Orson Welles for the writing of Citizen Kane, was actually filled with errors, some unintended but others either careless or worse. Yet it did focus our attention on Joe Manckiewicz's oft-forgotten brother. Movie critics now are sort of blah--they have little sense of the history of the medium and perhaps reflect what Kael just missed having to deal with: that movies too are largely aimed at teenagers. Kael really loved movies and in the end, that and a decent critical sense made her memorable.
The Ides of March was fun largely because it was a picture for grown-ups. We need many more like that.
The Sunday Times had a front-page review by Frank Rich of a biography and collected writings of Pauline Kael. Many will remember her as the very outspoken movie critic of The New Yorker back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. She had lots of faults--too cozy relationships with some movie industry types for one--but she also had an enthusiasm that is lacking in too many critics today. It turned out that her famous piece, "Raising Kane," about how Herman J. Manckiewicz deserved at least equal credit with Orson Welles for the writing of Citizen Kane, was actually filled with errors, some unintended but others either careless or worse. Yet it did focus our attention on Joe Manckiewicz's oft-forgotten brother. Movie critics now are sort of blah--they have little sense of the history of the medium and perhaps reflect what Kael just missed having to deal with: that movies too are largely aimed at teenagers. Kael really loved movies and in the end, that and a decent critical sense made her memorable.
The Ides of March was fun largely because it was a picture for grown-ups. We need many more like that.
The Greatest Game
Was it really the greatest game ever, the 6th game in St. Louis Thursday night? I recall watching the famed 1975 Game 6 when I was on a road trip in Jackson, MS--haven't been back there since. Bernie Carbo and Carlton Fisk. It did remind me of the game, I think involving the Angels some years ago, when Bob Boone got a hit when his club was also down to its last strike and it turned everything around.
It did show that baseball is in a class by itself when things like this happen. As it was, the game was not all that well played. Errors and mishaps made it seem like it was being played on Hallowe'en. But tension, excitement, hitters responding to the challenge, these all made it great. Forget about the bum performance of the managers, one overmanaging--not noticing he had used up his roster by the 9th, and the other sort of oblivious to the roof falling in on his club.
It was sort of wonderful that Pujols's performance in the earlier game where he tied Babe Ruth's homer record for a single Series game made such an impression that they continued to pitch around him and pitch to Berkman who was far more consistent. I know that good pitching always beats good hitting so it was good that there wasn't an overwhelming amount of great pitching--good pitching, yes. I liked it when Freese reminded everyone that the best hitter fails seven out of ten times.
Baseball remains a fantastic game in spite of those who run it. Here this wild crowd is packing the park in one of the great baseball towns and everyone, especially the players, are bundled up like Nanook of the North. And yes, they play these games so that an extra-inning extravaganza like Thursday's runs until almost 1 A.M. in the East. Yes, it's nostalgia but I love remembering the days when the local luncheonette would fill in the line score after each half-inning in the front window of the store in the afternoons when the Series was on.
Not that I ever expected to be rooting for the Cardinals, the proverbial "other team" for any National League fan. You didn't have to be a Dodger fan--I wasn't--also to recall how the Redbirds and their fans gave Jackie Robinson the worst welcome. It was emblematic of those days when they were clearly the Southern team of baseball. But we won't go into who used to own the Rangers--and I don't mean Bob Short, whose name lives on in the book of infamy reserved for franchise-movers like Lou Perini, Walter O'Malley, Horace Stoneham, Calvin Griffith, and Bob Irsay. I don't include Bill Veeck, mostly because he was getting clobbered as the Browns owner and baseball wouldn't let the club move until he sold it.
But back to this year. What a great wrap-up to a good post-season! Lots of surprises, lots of unheralded operatives who rose to the occasion. And you even had the NL playoff between the two beer capitals of America. I was in Busch Stadium a number of years ago when Anheuser-Busch still owned the club and yes, this was the night that more people showed up than they had expected and yes, the night that Busch Stadium ran out of beer! They did respond to the need, however, rolling kegs across the floor to replenish the stands. Now that's focusing on priorities.
It did show that baseball is in a class by itself when things like this happen. As it was, the game was not all that well played. Errors and mishaps made it seem like it was being played on Hallowe'en. But tension, excitement, hitters responding to the challenge, these all made it great. Forget about the bum performance of the managers, one overmanaging--not noticing he had used up his roster by the 9th, and the other sort of oblivious to the roof falling in on his club.
It was sort of wonderful that Pujols's performance in the earlier game where he tied Babe Ruth's homer record for a single Series game made such an impression that they continued to pitch around him and pitch to Berkman who was far more consistent. I know that good pitching always beats good hitting so it was good that there wasn't an overwhelming amount of great pitching--good pitching, yes. I liked it when Freese reminded everyone that the best hitter fails seven out of ten times.
Baseball remains a fantastic game in spite of those who run it. Here this wild crowd is packing the park in one of the great baseball towns and everyone, especially the players, are bundled up like Nanook of the North. And yes, they play these games so that an extra-inning extravaganza like Thursday's runs until almost 1 A.M. in the East. Yes, it's nostalgia but I love remembering the days when the local luncheonette would fill in the line score after each half-inning in the front window of the store in the afternoons when the Series was on.
Not that I ever expected to be rooting for the Cardinals, the proverbial "other team" for any National League fan. You didn't have to be a Dodger fan--I wasn't--also to recall how the Redbirds and their fans gave Jackie Robinson the worst welcome. It was emblematic of those days when they were clearly the Southern team of baseball. But we won't go into who used to own the Rangers--and I don't mean Bob Short, whose name lives on in the book of infamy reserved for franchise-movers like Lou Perini, Walter O'Malley, Horace Stoneham, Calvin Griffith, and Bob Irsay. I don't include Bill Veeck, mostly because he was getting clobbered as the Browns owner and baseball wouldn't let the club move until he sold it.
But back to this year. What a great wrap-up to a good post-season! Lots of surprises, lots of unheralded operatives who rose to the occasion. And you even had the NL playoff between the two beer capitals of America. I was in Busch Stadium a number of years ago when Anheuser-Busch still owned the club and yes, this was the night that more people showed up than they had expected and yes, the night that Busch Stadium ran out of beer! They did respond to the need, however, rolling kegs across the floor to replenish the stands. Now that's focusing on priorities.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
DeKooning
Had just enough time in New York City last Saturday on my way to New Jersey--true--to stop by the Museum of Modern Art to take in the massive Willem DeKooning show. If you bothered to know about art in the last half of the 20th century, you definitely heard about DeKooning. But until I saw this retrospective--the man lived from 1904 to 1997, and was seriously working from around 1940 until 1990--I merely had seen a few of his most famous canvases or pictures of them, such as one of the 'Woman' series of paintings.
It seems to me that he was both lucky and good. The major works--the several series of 'Woman' pictures and a few others--stand the test of time. They are still fascinating. The luck part is that there were major critics who appreciated his style; in addition, the charges of misogyny, largely emanating from those same 'Woman' pictures, since they are mightily unflattering, on the surface at least, arose at a time when charges like that didn't carry the weight they seem to today.
He also had no fear about changing his style, sometimes abruptly. He learned from different sources--some of his work drew on exposure to Japanese art and in his late years, he lurched toward minimalism with his canvases left largely white or painted white, with a few lines drawn on them. It's also helpful to his image that he painted a large backdrop for a friend's ballet production, based on one of his best works, and then got only the $50 from her which was all she could afford to pay him for the backdrop.
We often think about him as exemplifying the so-called "New York school" of abstract expressionism, whatever that may be. This show allows us to see him as an individual painter, moving quite bravely from style to style until he found one or more within which he felt comfortable. Yes, there are some of his paintings that are nearly totally abstract but many more that are not. So, for better or worse, he's not in the same place as Jackson Pollock, who is fascinating in his own, quite different way.
It happened that DeKooning had several solo shows at private New York galleries in the 1950s mainly, and they were wildly successful. It makes all the sense in the world that the Museum of Modern Art has mounted this great show that presents his whole career, which ran for a good 40-plus years. He did move out of the city to the East End of Long Island--much as Pollock did--but fortunately for him and for us, he did not get run down on a highway before he could show us how many different artistic lives he would have.
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