Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday June 19, 2010
|
LEO AND HIS CIRCLE: The Life of Leo Castelli
Annie Cohen-Solal. Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and the author
Knopf
ISBN 978-1-4000-4427-6
540 pages
$35
Reviewed by Amanda Vaill
Leo Castelli (1907-1999) -- the man variously referred to in the press as "the Metternich of art," "the Svengali of Pop" or "the Italian who invented American art" -- doesn't actually hang out his art-dealer's shingle until page 234 of Annie Cohen-Solal's 500-plus-page biography. The 17 preceding chapters are devoted to a multigenerational saga spanning Renaissance Tuscany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, fascist Trieste and places in between. If you are seeking a juicy gossip-stuffed dish about the New York art world in the go-go 1960s, '70s and '80s, your patience with the myriad details of this familial, economic and social history -- the explorations of arcane documents; the descriptions of bustling ports, palatial houses and family patriarchs -- may wear thin.
But Cohen-Solal is an intellectual historian, not a gossip maven. The author of a highly regarded study of Jean-Paul Sartre, former cultural counselor of the French Embassy in the United States and currently visiting arts professor at New York University, she believes "the true space in which Castelli abided" was "History with a capital H, which endures." Leo Castelli, she implies, was the product of his context and, as a result, the last of his kind.
In the world of Castelli's ancestors, as Cohen-Solal portrays it, wealth, negotiation, manipulation, networking and style all commingled; and it is this principle that guided Castelli's emergence from the cocoon of his privileged European upbringing -- sailor suits, private tutors, skiing holidays, the best tailors -- to dominate the rowdy New York art world. His banker father built a career on connections and access; the son -- although he had no taste for finance -- made a wealthy and influential marriage that provided him with the means of escape from Europe in 1939 when others (including his own family) were left to the ravages of the Nazis. And in New York, from the base of his father-in-law's mansion off Fifth Avenue, Castelli began to put the strengths of his forbears to work.
Always attracted to contemporary art -- he'd had a brief fling as partner in a surrealist gallery in Paris on the eve of the war -- Castelli sought out Alfred Barr, the legendary curator of the Museum of Modern Art; went to all the 57th Street galleries and befriended their artists, asking them to parties at his father-in-law's mansion; and became one of only three non-artists to be a founding member of the Abstract-Expressionist conclave The Club, because, as he said, "the point was to be with these people, to live their lives."
He sidled into the business side of art by becoming an agent for Wassily Kandinsky's widow -- thus initiating, as Cohen-Solal says, "the modus operandi of selling through personal networks that would be one of the keys to the future gallerist's success." Importantly, he didn't want to sell older European artists, or even the now-established American abstractionists like Pollock and de Kooning, both personal friends: When Castelli opened his eponymous gallery in his father-in-law's house, the art he wanted to show was whatever was next. "I tried deliberately to detect that other thing," he said, "and stumbled upon (Robert) Rauschenberg (and Jasper) Johns."
The shows Castelli devoted to the two artists in early 1958 created a sensation, launching each as a contemporary master and propelling the gallerist himself to the white-hot center of the New York art world. They also established Castelli's method: He would nose out the best new talent by poking around galleries and studios, leverage his friendships with museum directors like Barr into sales or shows that increased his artists' market value, and use his connections with journalists to promote coverage of the results. At the same time, so as to free the artists from dependence on individual sales, he pioneered the practice of giving them a drawing account from the gallery, to be repaid when their paintings sold. It was an old-world, imperial gesture, in the service of ultra-contemporary work -- but then, as this book suggests, so was everything else about Leo Castelli.
Castelli represented virtually every major American artist of the next two decades, from Frank Stella, James Rosenquist and Richard Serra to Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Indeed, Cohen-Solal suggests that his championship of American artists won them "new stature at home and abroad" and "introduce(d) major new currents into the flow of art history." Castelli was at the center of controversy numerous times -- for, among other things, the alleged arm-twisting at the Venice Biennale that led to Rauschenberg's receiving the top prize in 1964; for his feud with the Metropolitan Museum's hard-charging modern curator Henry Geldzahler; for maintaining (and allegedly manipulating) "waiting lists" for certain painters' work and excluding would-be collectors from it. But by actively searching out provocative new work, by understanding the nexus between art and fashion, and art and commerce, and by creating tentacles of affiliate galleries to promote his artists worldwide, this slight, diffident man changed the way the art world worked. If, in the end, new waves in art formed and other dealers (many mentored by Castelli) caught them, none had his effect. As the collector Eli Broad says, "They don't make Castellis anymore."
Annie Cohen-Solal knew Castelli and many of the participants in his story, and had access to his papers, including datebooks that bear witness to his wide-ranging curiosity and passion for detail, and dozens of candid photographs to illuminate the text. So it may be inevitable that the story she tells is skewed towards the gallerist's own perspective. It is also -- despite her personal knowledge of her subject -- not an intimate portrait: Castelli the man, as opposed to the persona he created, remains elusive in these pages, an elegant but somehow unknowable figure. But perhaps that's how Castelli himself would have wanted it. As he remarked, straight-faced, to a reporter once, "There is no such thing as adequate myth-making."
Amanda Vaill's documentary "Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About" won both the Emmy and Peabody Awards; she is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative entitled "Hotel Florida: Love and Death in Spain, 1936-1939."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Send Story to a Friend | Top |
HOW TO COOL THE PLANET: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate
HOW TO COOL THE PLANET: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's ClimateJeff Goodell
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0618990610
262 pages
$26
HACK THE PLANET: Science's Best Hope -- Or Worst Nightmare -- For Averting Climate CatastropheEli Kintisch
Wiley
ISBN 978-0470524268
279 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Bill Gifford
Eighteen years ago, Washington enjoyed that rarest of seasons: a pleasant summer. I still remember it fondly. You could go jogging in July without risk of heatstroke. You could sit outside without your shirt plastering itself to your armpits. It was, by the city's swampy standards, a wonderful time.
The year 1992 was the Summer of Pinatubo, after the huge volcano that had erupted in the Philippines the previous fall, spewing millions of tons of ash into the stratosphere. There it dispersed into a thin layer that not only improved sunsets from Martha's Vineyard to Malibu, but also reflected some of the sun's rays out into space, lowering global temperatures by about half a degree Celsius, on average -- apparently enough to make a D.C. summer bearable.
The Pinatubo Effect was so dramatic that it kick-started the science of "geoengineering," which basically means manipulating the Earth's climate. We're already doing that unintentionally, of course, but the idea here is to somehow undo, or at least mitigate, manmade climate change. As the prospect of drastic warming evolves from worst-case scenario to virtual certainty (outside the world of Fox News, that is), the notion of some kind of technological quick fix is looking more and more appealing. It's still in the speculative stages, but it has already produced these two highly unsettling books.
Among the ideas that have been broached is dumping various odd substances into the sea, such as iron filings (to promote growth of carbon dioxide-consuming plankton) and -- no kidding -- Special K cereal, which would supposedly increase the sea's reflectivity, thus keeping it cooler. One of the least crazy possible methods is the so-called Pinatubo Option, in which we would somehow cloak the earth's atmosphere in a layer of reflective particles, which would block the sun and cool the planet just enough to maintain some kind of climatic equilibrium.
Depending on your point of view, this sort of action is either urgently necessary or the global equivalent of playing Russian roulette. Probably both. Would we come out on the other side with pleasant summers and mild winters, the seas and the skies in perfect climatic harmony? Or would it end up, as Jeff Goodell writes in "How to Cool the Planet," "like a bad sci-fi novel writ large?" In the disaster movie that could be our future, will Manhattan be crushed by giant icebergs or flooded by a warm tropical tsunami?
Certainly, human history is rife with such experiments gone wrong, where "solving" one ecological problem simply created a whole bunch of new ones. Take the cane toad, imported to save Australia's sugar crop from a destructive type of worm. The poisonous toads quickly spread everywhere and drove out native species, running rampant in the absence of natural predators. Or of more immediate concern: some of the chemical dispersants now being used on the Gulf oil spill are likely to be more toxic and environmentally damaging than the crude oil itself.
Apart from a handful of self-styled rainmakers, whose colorful history Goodell recounts, humans haven't tried to mess much with the climate. Curiously, however, climate research was strong on both sides of the Cold War, as the Soviets tinkered with ways to make Siberia more temperate, while the Americans looked into the implications of "nuclear winter." (Also, Lyndon Johnson spent millions on a secret program to try and make it rain on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.) One of the leading advocates for geoengineering was the late Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, archpriest of the Nuclear Age and clearly a guy who liked to think big.
But the thing about climate and weather is that they are highly unpredictable -- and never abide by our notions of fairness. If we cool off Washington's summers, will we also disrupt the Asian monsoons, which help supply food for billions of people? For whose benefit would the climate be changed? The scorching European summer of 2003, for example, was terrible for the elderly, thousands of whom perished -- but it was a great year for Bordeaux. And what if countries used climate-control as a weapon against their foes? "Depending on your perspective," writes Eli Kintisch in "Hack the Planet," "the uncertainty surrounding the Pinatubo Option feels like either an ethical deal breaker or a regrettable price for an idea that might save the human race." (Although, according to Kintisch, a Pinatuboized climate would probably be more stable than one where warming is left unchecked.) We won't know until, or if, we try it.
We're still a long way from that point. As the ecological theorist James Lovelock puts it, climate science is as inexact as 19th-century medicine, leeches and all. The closest we've come was that strange but entertaining private-sector effort to seed the oceans with iron filings, by a now-defunct startup company called Planktos. But as the climate heats up, and if scientists' predictions of scary, sudden changes come true, such options are going to look more attractive. Especially the Pinatubo Option: We could scatter particles into the stratosphere with a fleet of high-altitude planes, for the (relatively) low price of a few billion dollars. Or, as another scientist has suggested, we could seed the stratosphere via miles and miles of hoses, held aloft by blimps and spraying tiny particles into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Other scientists have looked at methods of "cloud brightening," with much the same goal.
Though they cover much the same ground, "How to Cool the Planet" and "Hack the Planet" take somewhat different approaches to the topic. Goodell, also the author of "Big Coal," is more of a storytelling, big-picture guy, who hobnobs with the likes of Lovelock and Bill Gates. Kintisch, an editor at Science magazine, is less facile with his prose but delves deeper into the science and the politics behind geoengineering. Goodell hangs with the generals, while Kintisch hunkers in the trenches.
Yet both books leave some big questions unanswered, such as: How would this work in practice? It's still early, and geoengineering remains largely hypothetical. Very little basic research has been done, thanks in part to obstruction by environmentalists, for whom the idea of quick fixes is anathema.
It shouldn't be. Reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- or even just slowing the rate of growth -- is going to require drastic cutbacks in our sacrosanct "American way of life." That seems about as likely as weaning China and India off coal -- another prerequisite to cutting carbon dioxide. "Our approach to dealing with global warming so far," Goodell writes, "has essentially been to ask everyone on the planet to come together, understand what is at stake, and do the right thing." But human behavior isn't always driven by fear of long-term consequences, as anyone who's ever had a hangover knows. We've been doing as we pleased for centuries; it's a lot to expect us to change our consuming, polluting ways, at least enough to make a difference. Both books lead the reader to conclude that, sooner or later, we're going to reach for the quick fix. It could be a well-thought-out, globally agreed-upon plan to stabilize Earth's climate -- or a last-ditch effort to stop Earth from turning into Venus. As both books make clear, in their words but also in their brevity, the science is all still very hypothetical. Call it climate-hacking, planet-cooling or geoengineering -- it'd sure be nice if, when the time comes, we knew what we were doing.
Bill Gifford, editor at large of Men's Journal, lives in New York.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Send Story to a Friend | Top |
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Send Story to a Friend | Top |
Advertisement Order professional quality Business Cards with this special
offer from Vistaprint, the world's leading online printer. Plus Get a FREE Business Card Holder with your purchase! * Choose from stock designs or upload your own
* Select a horizontal or vertical layout, and add text,
calendars and more on back
* Choose your stock, and receive in as few as 3 days! |
From the ArcaMax Book Club
ArcaMax offers you a collection of more than 600 free classic books online -- available by e-mail one chapter per day. The complete versions are available online so you can read at your pace and update your e-mail subscription -- an "online bookmark" for the next time you sit down to read.
|
| Recent Stories |
 HOUSE OF SECRETS
DAY FOR NIGHT
I WAS BORN THIS WAY: A Gay Preacher's Journey Through Gospel Music, Disco Stardom, and a Ministry in Christ
THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE
BEACH WEEK |
| More From ArcaMax Publishing |
|
|
|
|
| |
